Watch a TED talk on QAN!

Our TED talk on Queer African Network was published last week and has enabled us to reach our target audience of queer Africans around the world. Given that our issue area is underfunded and deeply neglected, it is surreal to see that this talk has garnered 400,000 views and 13,000 likes in only a week. This response illuminates the urgent need for building a world where queer Africans are safe online and thriving offline.

QAN's co-founders, Nerima Makhondo and Okong'o Kinyanjui, are excited to continue co-designing our mobile application alongside our members with the goal of shifting power to the people most impacted by the outcomes of the age of surveillance capitalism. Unlike dominant social media platforms that take a top-down approach and view their members as cash cows; we take a bottom-up approach that puts trust in our members’ deep knowledge that enables us to design solutions with them. By continuing to adopt this approach and focusing on root-causes we will create radical (not incremental) impact.

We hope that by sharing the talk here, you would be interested in working alongside us, or supporting us, to become the primary tool used across the African continent for coalition-building and resource flows. We need all hands on deck--especially as new regimes continue to defend colonial penal codes that lead to arbitrary arrests, violence, and degrade queer African’s right to privacy and freedom.