The recent four-day Paradigm Initiative (PIN) Festival turned out to be a success as the PIN team unveiled their new offices and engaged in a mix of insightful activities.

Social enterprise (PIN) known for building an ICT-enabled support system and advocating digital rights in order to improve livelihoods for under-served youth, hosted the first-ever hybrid festival in Senegal.

Held from September 20-23, 2021 at the Fleur de Lys Hotel Plateau, Dakar, the Festival was attended by locals and a host of digital rights actors from within Senegal.

Day one of the Festival saw the official opening of the PINs office in Thiès. The local community through the opening of the office will be benefiting from an ultra-modern ICT lab with up-to-date equipment that makes it PIN’s first training center out of Nigeria. As an organization working to better the livelihood of underserved youth by impacting them with digital skills while protecting their rights, the training center will play a great role in ICT capacity building amongst the youth and it will also go a long way to instill PINs digital inclusion programs within the country and the region.

In her opening remark, the Chief Operating Officer at PIN, Nnenna Paul Ugochukwu highlighted the importance and the essence of PIN’s move to Senegal stating “the challenges and inequalities we face when it comes to access and digital affordability, inclusion, and digital empowerment, persist across the continent and PINs initiative and vision is to close this ever widen gap”. She equally acknowledged the support of its local partner Generation Saalih for mobilizing and ensuring the participation of some key members in the community.

Day two saw the participation of over 20 delegates and digital right actors from all over Senegal merged at hotel Fleur de Lys Plateau, in an interactive session. The major highlights of the day were the launching of the PIN boxsets and the projection of Focus (https://bit.ly/3AXWegO). The boxsets contained research outputs, reports, and tool kits of PIN's work between the periods 2020/2021, such as the Londa Report (https://bit.ly/3CVU6Xy) PINs 2020 Digital Rights and Inclusion annual report, The DPAS Report (https://bit.ly/3B04IEf), The Ayeta Tool Kit (https://bit.ly/3m5n9B2), A compendium health surveillance report (https://bit.ly/3kRVuEm), Ripoti (https://ripoti.africa), and Digital Inclusion info packs. Focus is a short film drawn from PIN's 2020 annual digital rights and inclusion report dubbed Londa. The report depicts the state of digital rights and inclusion in 20 African countries.

The movie was an exploratory way PIN used to best impact society through storytelling while spotlighting key issues plaguing the digital rights and inclusion ecosystems.

Day three and four was set aside for the Digital Rights Academy, an intensive training workshop with over 20 local delegates in attendance who received hands-on training and coaching from key leaders and actors in the digital field. The workshop served as an opener for the delegates to have a clear understanding of digital rights issues such as internet shutdowns, digital rights violations, thematic, the ecosystem, and how to best handle and take action. Group assignments, presentations, interactive question and answer sessions characterized the two-day workshop. Delegates expressed their utmost satisfaction and promised to use the knowledge acquired for the betterment of their digital rights activism in their respective areas.