1) Grounded. GROUNDED is fully open source, shared AI infrastructure for African newsrooms — a platform where a newsroom builds its own AI workflows from a team of prepackaged AI agents. This is packaged with intense mentoring from the Develop AI team to make sure the software to constantly updating and tailored to the evolving African media landscape. There are eight agents at launch (including a Verifier, Archivist, Researcher, Translator and Social Media Listener) alongside five tools (covering fundraising, audience analytics, AI legal tracking and AI security audits.

A builder in the newsroom drags agents onto a canvas, wires them into a named workflow, and ships it to the team. The rest of the newsroom uses what the builder ships, usually over WhatsApp. When one newsroom builds a workflow that works, like verify a story, rewrite it for social, and translate it into an African language, that workflow becomes available across the whole network. Built once, used everywhere. Each newsroom runs its own Node: a locally-deployed instance of the platform that keeps sensitive material on the newsroom's own hardware and stays online even when the connection isn't.

2) Awareness AI. The starting observation is straightforward: AI literacy is being pushed at children, teachers and parents, but the missing layer is data literacy: what is being collected, by whom, for what and at what aggregate cost. Schools are where that asymmetry is sharpest. The same tools sold as educational goods depend on the systematic harvesting of personal information from learners and the adults around them and the communities least equipped to negotiate that trade are the ones being most aggressively extracted from.

Our project Awareness AI scales age-appropriate, audience-specific data literacy through South African schools, beginning with a white paper grounded in the realities of Africa. The aim is not abstinence (that ship has sailed) but informed engagement: giving learners the means to recognise the data trade, giving teachers frameworks that protect their classrooms, and giving parents the questions to ask and the rights they already hold under POPIA.