An annual celebration of African unity, Africa Day commemorates the founding of the African Union. Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, thinking about a “Borderless Africa: Celebrating Commonalities” has a special resonance.



We’re lending our support to the (virtual) festivities, as well as to fundraising efforts in support of aid organizations.

We are kicking things off with the Africa Day Benefit Concert At Home, in partnership with Viacom and MTV Base. The two-hour special on YouTube, hosted by Idris Elba, will bring together multiple African artists: Angelique Kidjo, Burna Boy, Sauti Sol, Sho Madjozi, Diamond Platnumz and more. The concert showcases the continent’s music during a month-long campaign to support UNICEF and the UN World Food Program in providing food assistance to Africans affected by COVID-19.

If the concert leaves you wanting more, head over to YouTube Music and check out our Africa Day playlist: Between the afrobeat, a bit of house and African soul, you’ll be getting a musical tour of the continent from your home. Along with contemporary artists like Eddy Kenzo, Lady Zamar, Sauti Sol and Wizkid, it also draws from the sounds of great African voices past, such as Fela Kuti, Hugh Masekela and Johnny Clegg.


For more of our shared cultural heritage and creativity, visit the online exhibit 11 Ways to Celebrate Africa Day at Google Arts & Culture. Discover what unites us across art, food, music, fashion, people, landmarks and more. Peruse the collections of 26 cultural institutions, or use search tools like color and time to explore over 15,000 photographs.. Get the party started with a hearty bowl of jollof rice, visit the Great Pyramid of Giza, feel the beat of the African drum, and zoom into the intricate beadwork of a Ndebele cape. Or turn your home into a gallery: with Art Projector you can virtually place the artwork of Mary Ogembo in your living room—or just turn your living room into Tanzania’s Gereza Fort through augmented reality.


Happy Africa Day from all of us at Google Africa.


Charles Murito, Director, Government Affairs and Public Policy, SSA

The spread of COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on the health, jobs and lives of millions of Africans and people around the world. We’ve all had to make fundamental changes to the way we live and work, and businesses everywhere have been impacted. Yet we’ve also heard inspiring stories of healthcare workers on the front lines, businesses providing vital resources and support, and families and communities being there for one another—showing us that if everyone plays their part, we can and will get through this together.

The “Stay home, Save lives” Doodle on the Google across Africa homepage 3-5 April

Overcoming a crisis of this scale will take a sustained effort, and we want to do everything we can to help. Since the virus first began to spread, our focus at Google has been on making sure millions of people in Africa and around the world have the information and tools they need. But we know there’s much more work ahead.

We’re sharing here the actions we’ve taken to support Africans both in the ongoing short-term response to the virus and in the longer-term, concentrating on three priorities:

• Helping make reliable information available;
• Helping Teachers and Students
• Helping Small Businesses

We’re working closely with governments, businesses, health and education sectors, and not-for-profit and community organisations to ensure people can get help when they need it most. We want to build on our existing partnerships and programs to support Africans, while responding to the urgent challenges we now face.


Helping make reliable information available
It's crucial that people have access to health information they can trust online, so they can make the right decisions to protect themselves and those around them from COVID-19. We've surfaced the latest updates and health advice from government and health authorities, promoted awareness campaigns, shared travel advisories, and provided regular updates on the Search trends we are seeing as Africans look for help and information. We’ve also provided ads grants to a number of African governments to help communicate information to the public.

To ensure Africans have access to all the latest information in one spot, we’ve launched a local COVID-19 microsite featuring the latest updates and health resources. And we’re providing Community Mobility Reports that analyse aggregate, anonymised location history and provide local insights on the impact of social distancing.

Alongside our work to promote authoritative sources, we’ve stepped up our efforts to curb misinformation spreading on Google, YouTube or through apps on the Play Store. We have already taken down thousands of YouTube videos featuring dangerous or misleading coronavirus information since early February 2020, and continue to remove videos that promote medically unproven methods to prevent coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment.

We're going to build on these efforts in the months ahead to ensure people have access to reliable information. In Africa, we’re supporting Africa Check to connect fact-checkers and reporters to expert individuals and organisations around the COVID-19 crisis. We’re also supporting Code for Africa as they provide crucial training and resources for journalists working remotely, and expanding our global investment in fact checking organization First Draft to strengthen efforts to combat misinformation.


Helping Teachers and Students across Africa
Millions of African students are out of school because of restrictions on movement and gatherings. That’s putting pressure on families, schools and the incredible teachers who foster our children’s passion for learning.

To help teachers get the support they need to teach remotely, we’ve made tools like Google Meet and Google Classroom available for free, provided training and tips through both Google and YouTube (and YouTube creators are getting on board too—check out the latest tips from Eddie Woo), and launched Teach from Home with UNESCO as a central hub for teachers around the world.

We’ve also built a remote work hub on the Grow with Google site to help people work, teach and learn from anywhere, along with a distance learning website that includes training materials and a new YouTube Learning Hub to help schools, teachers, parents and students. And we launched a local #StayHome #WithMe campaign on YouTube to help people feel more connected, entertained and informed during social distancing.

Schools in Africa can have access to expedited G Suite for Education domain sign-ups (for free) and we are working with education departments around the country to pre-approve school domains to help educators and learners continue their teaching and learning remotely and explore further opportunities for support.

We all know the power of great teachers and inspiring lessons, and we hope these steps will help our kids continue to learn from home, and return energised when school resumes.


Helping Small Businesses
Small businesses are the heart of our economy and communities, from retailers to restaurants, and they've been among the hardest hit by the outbreak.

We recently made an announcement to support small businesses, health organisations and governments with access to finance, ad credits and grants to help meet the costs of the virus (small businesses can find more information here). We are providing $18.75 million in ad grants for government agencies and ad credits for SMBs in Africa.

At the same time, we will be expanding our programs to train local small businesses in digital skills, provide them with cloud-based tools, and enable their employees to work remotely. We have launched a website to help African businesses navigate through the uncertainty of COVID-19.

Google.org committed USD 4 million to fund the J-PAL Jobs and Opportunity Initiative (JOI) with the focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the funding allowed J-PAl at MIT to rapidly support research that helps us understand how vulnerable workers are being impacted by the virus, and how to design effective and rapid policy responses to protect these workers. In Kenya, researchers are testing the effectiveness of delivering cash grants to female microenterprise owners and in Lagos, Nigeria another study aims to inform policymakers about the different needs of informal vendors, and which groups would be more likely to use state-provided services.

Many not-for-profits have enrolled in our Google for Nonprofits program and also have access to these facilities. Google for Nonprofits is already in Kenya, but we're launching in Nigeria, Tanzania and Ghana. We will be working with governments and NGOs to support relief initiatives and build economic resilience in the community, as well as matching our employees’ individual donations to charitable organizations.


Upholding our responsibility
COVID-19 puts intense demands on us all, and we’re determined to uphold our responsibility in this unprecedented time: to enable access to trusted information, support remote learning, back small businesses, and more. These initiatives are just the start. We continue working to help Africans deal with COVID-19 and shape a stronger future.

In these unprecedented times, we can feel a little overwhelmed in terms of how to adapt to the new norm, but also how to help those in need. With governments closing schools in more than 190 countries, 91% of the world’s student population is currently out of school, and as such, the health crisis is also turning into an education crisis. In Sub-Saharan Africa, we have more than 160M primary school learners at home at the moment.

At Google, we believe technology can help kids around the world learn how to read and can move us closer to the goal of basic universal literacy. Thanks to the hard work of app developers and nonprofits, we are uniquely positioned to give out-of-school children the opportunity to learn to read and write via smartphone apps. We’re proud to highlight some literacy apps in the Google Play Store that enable a fun and engaged approach to learning.

• Curious Learning, a nonprofit promoting access to effective literacy content, brings fun and localised language-learning to kids via their app, Feed the Monster. This educational game focuses on phonological awareness, letter recognition, vocabulary and more, and is available in more than 48 languages. By playing the game, kids learn the fundamentals of reading with the help of cute pet monsters that grow into new friends by feeding them letters.
• Ubongo is a social enterprise producing kids’ educational media for platforms, including apps, TV and radio programmes, in East Africa and beyond. They’ve created fun, locally-made cartoons, featuring characters like Akili, and teach children the basics of the alphabet through playful singing in their apps.
• Kukua is building a universe of immersive learning experience centered around child heroine Sema (@super_sema_). Spanning apps, books, TV series and more, Sema takes kids on a game-based learning adventure through magical African landscapes. Their apps are highly engaging and teach kids to recognise, distinguish and trace letters in a playful way.
• Bolo is an AI-enabled, speech-based reading app that encourages children to read aloud. Recently launched in 13 African countries, it will be available in more African countries later this year.

Each of the organisations have bold missions, be it empowering everyone to have the opportunity to learn to read (Curious Learning), helping Africa's children leverage their literacy skills to change lives for the better (Ubongo), or empowering girls and children with the confidence to change the world (Kukua). We want to support them by bringing their apps to parents and children that need them today. 

As people around the world are staying at home due to COVID-19, many are turning to new apps and communications tools to work, learn, access information, and stay connected with loved ones.

While these digital platforms are helpful in our daily lives, they can also introduce new online security risks. Our Threat Analysis Group continually monitors for sophisticated, government-backed hacking activity and is seeing new COVID-19 messaging used in attacks, and our security systems have detected a range of new scams such as phishing emails posing as messages from charities and NGOs battling COVID-19, directions from “administrators” to employees working from home, and even notices spoofing healthcare providers. Our systems have also spotted malware-laden sites that pose as sign-in pages for popular social media accounts, health organizations, and even official coronavirus maps. During the past couple of weeks, our advanced, machine-learning classifiers have seen 18 million daily malware and phishing attempts related to COVID-19, in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related spam messages.

To protect you from these risks, we've built advanced security protections into Google products to automatically identify and stop threats before they ever reach you. Our machine learning models in Gmail already detect and block more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing and malware. Our built-in security also protects you by alerting you before you enter fraudulent websites, scanning apps in Google Play before you download, and more. But we want to help you stay secure everywhere online, not just on our products, so we’re providing these simple tips, tools and resources.

Know how to spot and avoid COVID-19 scams

The retail sector has faced many threats over the years, which have only intensified during the coronavirus pandemic. With physical stores shuttered, digital commerce has become a lifeline for retailers. And as consumers increasingly shop online, they're searching not just for essentials but also things like toys, apparel, and home goods. While this presents an opportunity for struggling businesses to reconnect with consumers, many cannot afford to do so at scale.

In light of these challenges, we’re advancing our plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google.

Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free product listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google. With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship, but are less discoverable online.

For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings. If you’re an existing user of Merchant Center and Shopping ads, you don't have to do anything to take advantage of the free listings, and for new users of Merchant Center, we'll continue working to streamline the onboarding process over the coming weeks and months.

These changes will take effect in the U.S. before the end of April, and we aim to expand this globally before the end of the year. Our help center has more details on how to participate in free product listings and Shopping ads.

We’re also kicking off a new partnership with PayPal to allow merchants to link their accounts. This will speed up our onboarding process and ensure we’re surfacing the highest quality results for our users. And we’re continuing to work closely with many of our existing partners that help merchants manage their products and inventory, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, to make digital commerce more accessible for businesses of all sizes.

Solutions during this crisis will not be fast or easy, but we hope to provide a measure of relief for businesses and lay the groundwork for a healthier retail ecosystem in the future.

Posted by Bill Ready, President, Commerce

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We are pleased to announce the third round of Google Africa Developer Scholarships, as part of our commitment to create skills and economic opportunities for Africa. This builds on our 5-year engagement to help bridge the developer skills and opportunities gap in Africa by providing 100,000 African developers with access to high-quality, world-class training on mobile technologies and Cloud platforms. 

Local news is a vital resource for keeping people and communities connected in the best of times. Today, it plays an even greater function in reporting on local lockdowns or shelter at home orders, school and park closures, and data about how COVID-19 is affecting daily life.

Local news is a vital resource for keeping people and communities connected in the best of times. Today, it plays an even greater function in reporting on local lockdowns or shelter at home orders, school and park closures, and data about how COVID-19 is affecting daily life.

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