Funding for Six Innovative Projects in Latin America and the Caribbean

30/06/2016

Six innovative Information Technology (ICT) projects will receive financial support from the Regional Fund for Digital Innovation in Latin America and the Caribbean (FRIDA) to promote social and economic development and Internet access in the region.

These projects are the winners of the 2016 FRIDA Grants and will receive a total of US$145,000 from the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC), the Internet Society and LACNIC.

The projects chosen by FRIDA Selection Committee were Digital Mapping by Organización Perpendicular (Guatemala), Digital and Accessible Library ( by Uruguay’s National Association for the Blind (Uruguay), Radio Amazónica: Digital High-Frequency Radio by Sao Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil), IPv6 Deployment by the National University of Tucumán (Argentina), Protecting the TOR Network against Malicious Traffic by Campinas State University (Brazil), and BGP Security in RENATA’s Infrastructure by RENATA, the National Advanced Technology Academic Network (Colombia). Each organization will receive between US$20,000 and US$30,000 to execute their projects.

“We are proud that the community entrusts LACNIC with its ideas for promoting social and economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean,” noted Carolina Caeiro, head of the FRIDA Program.

These six proposals were selected by the members of the FRIDA Selection Committee —Ida Holz, Amparo Arango, Jesus Martinez, Daniela Kreimer, Antonio Moreiras and Juan Manuel Casanueve— after an extensive evaluation process. Speaking on behalf of the Committee, Amparo Arango noted that they had received highly innovative project proposals involving the use of ICTs and the adoption of new trends.

FRIDA Grants.

The Digital Mapping project by Guatemala’s Organización Perpendicular seeks to gather information on approximately 300 informal settlements with the help of drones and mobile devices. This data will help streamline and prioritize public policies and actions to prevent tragedies in these areas. The information will be available via an online platform. http://comunidad.socialab.com/ideas/ver/19953

The goal of Digital and Accessible Library, a project submitted by the Uruguayan Association for the Blind, is to provide digital education tools for children, teenagers and young people with visual disabilities. Their proposal consists of creating a system for digitizing books and making them available online in various formats. http://comunidad.socialab.com/ideas/ver/19394

Radio Amazónica: Digital High-Frequency Radio, a project by São Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil) seeks to provide digital communication infrastructure to traditional communities in isolated rural areas in the state of Acre, part of the Brazilian Amazon. This activity is the continuation of a research project completed in 2015 through which five high-frequency radio stations were installed in the Alto Juruá reserve, in communities with no communication infrastructure, sometimes even a day’s boat ride away from the nearest phone.

More information: http://comunidad.socialab.com/ideas/ver/19983

Submitted by Campinas State University (Brazil), the project for Protecting the TOR Network against Malicious Traffic seeks to implement a solution to the growing amount of malicious traffic using this network. Its goal is to research methods and techniques for protecting the Tor network against malicious traffic, while maintaining the privacy and anonymity of harmless traffic.

http://comunidad.socialab.com/ideas/ver/19906

Another winning project, BGP Security by RENATA (Colombia’s National Advanced Technology Academic Network) involves implementing origin validation for BGP routes in RENATA’s network backbone.  http://comunidad.socialab.com/ideas/ver/19927

The last selected project was IPv6 Deployment by the National University of Tucumán (UNT), the largest university of Northern Argentina. This project will address the coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6, first in one of the centers with the largest network infrastructure and then gradually migrating to other centers until the university’s entire infrastructure is operating on native IPv6.  Details of this initiative can be found at http://comunidad.socialab.com/ideas/ver/19641

FRIDA is the Regional Fund for Digital Innovation in Latin America and the Caribbean. This LACNIC initiative is supported by the International Centre for Development Research (IDRC) of Canada and the Internet Society.