About Ona
We put the funding where everyone can see it.
Ona is a public record of the funding open to Africa’s cultural and creative industries. We gather the grants, prizes, residencies and fellowships scattered across hundreds of websites, put them in one place, and keep them current. Whether you’re in Kisumu or Dakar, you see what someone with a well-connected inbox sees.
Ona means “see” in Swahili. That’s the point. Making funding visible to the people who should have it.
The problem we’re solving
The money exists. Funders across the continent and beyond put real sums into African creative work every year. What doesn’t exist is an easy way to find it.
Opportunities go up on individual funder sites, sit inside newsletters, or pass between people who already know each other. Deadlines slip by quietly. Calls close before the people they were meant for ever hear about them. Access ends up turning on the reach of someone’s network rather than the strength of their work.
That’s a solvable problem. We do the looking, so the same information reaches everyone at once, in one place, for free.
How we verify
A database is only worth using if you can trust it. Here’s what happens before an entry appears on the site.
We watch the sources.
Funder websites, open-call pages and grant directories across the continent get checked on a schedule, so new opportunities surface without anyone hunting for them.
We pull out the facts that matter.
Every page is read and reduced to what you actually need: who is funding, how much, who can apply, which sectors, and when it closes.
We throw out what isn’t an opportunity.
Directory pages, news articles and “about us” pages get rejected rather than filed as grants, so the database stays a list of things you can genuinely apply for.
We check the dates.
Closed calls drop out of the default view on their own. Anything closing within a month is flagged, so you see the urgency before the detail.
We show our working.
Every profile carries a “last verified” date and a link to the source, so you can see how current an entry is and check it yourself.
Who’s behind Ona
David Amira
Founder
David Amira is a communications strategist based in Nairobi. His background is in pan-African communications and advocacy, spanning media, campaigns and stakeholder work for organisations across the continent.
Over more than a decade working across the continent, he kept noticing the same thing. Opportunity travels through networks, and the people outside those networks tend to hear about it too late, if they hear at all. Ona is his attempt to change who gets to see what.