Introducing Animal Advocacy Africa

Animal Advocacy Africa (AAA) aims to develop a collaborative and effective animal advocacy movement in Africa. We plan to do this by engaging organisations and individual advocates within farmed animal advocacy in Africa and using this engagement to seek cost-effective opportunities to help animals. We aim to achieve this via a two-stage process:

• Six-month research phase: Identifying which barriers are holding the animal advocacy movement back in Africa, and which interventions can most effectively address these barriers. We have contacted organisations in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland.

• Six-month pilot phase: Implementing a pilot program based on our findings, which we can later scale up in countries that seem promising to work in (e.g. because there are existing organisations working there that we could support). If we can’t find a strong pilot candidate that we can scale, we plan to pivot to an alternative approach.

AAA is a program of Credence Institute, a non-profit dedicated to advancing the interests of animals. The team at Credence has over a decade’s worth of experience in animal advocacy and the meat alternatives space in Africa, developing relationships with people from the EA community, industry, academia, and the animal sciences along the way. We can draw upon these relationships, and those of its associates’, board, and volunteers, to engage key stakeholders in the animal advocacy movement, both in Africa as well as abroad.

How You Can Get Involved 

Advisors: We are currently looking for mission-aligned individuals from the effective altruism and animal advocacy communities who have an interest in our work to join our advisory board. Specifically, we are seeking advisors who have connections or in-country animal advocacy experience in Africa beyond South Africa. 

Hires: To ensure representation within Africa and build a solid network, we aim to integrate individuals from the continent beyond South Africa into the leadership team as soon as possible. Therefore, we intend to hire a Program Director in 2021 who will help develop AAA’s overall strategic direction in Africa and oversee stakeholder relations. We will publish more information regarding this vacancy early next year. Please sign up to our newsletter if you wish to be notified of this opportunity.

Funding: The Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund has awarded us a grant of $40,000, which will enable our organisation to operate for the first six months. Depending on the nature of the intervention during the pilot phase, we will seek at least $40,000 from March 2021 to support the operational costs of testing a scalable, cost-effective and tractable intervention for a further six months.

Feedback: We greatly value your feedback, ideas and connections, particularly at this early stage. Please feel free to post your comments below or reach out to us directly through our contact form.