Mexico Safe Online is looking for pilot partners
Applications close at 23:59 CST (UTC−6) on Monday 2nd November
We're inviting Mexico-based organisations to propose tech-enabled solutions that could strengthen the country's response to online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA). We'll fund and support up to five pilots, tested alongside the institutions that would one day need to use them.
Deadline for applications: Monday, November 2nd, 23:59 CST (UTC−6)
Apply through the online form here.
The Challenge
Mexico carries one of the heaviest known burdens of online child sexual exploitation and abuse in the region. Recent evidence suggests that one in eight adolescent internet users in Mexico experiences online sexual exploitation or abuse in a single year: an estimated 1.6 million adolescents. Girls are disproportionately affected, and more than 10 million women and girls experience digital violence each year.
Awareness is growing, but institutional responses remain fragmented and inconsistent. That means delayed intervention, longer exposure to harmful content, re-victimization, and unequal access to support for girls, children with disabilities and other at-risk groups. At this scale, even modest improvements in how cases are detected, triaged, referred and acted on could protect very large numbers of children.
Mexico Safe Online, led by the Frontier Tech Hub and funded by the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), is working with Mexican public institutions and specialist civil society to explore how that gap can be closed. We believe technology can help, but rarely on its own. Its value depends on whether it meets a real need in the existing response system, and whether it can work within the legal, data, safeguarding, and operational conditions around it.
The opportunity
We'll select a deliberately varied portfolio of up to five pilots from December 20206 to March 2027, each funded up to £20k. Our ambition is to generate practical evidence on what would need to be true for a solution to be adopted, integrated into institutions, and scaled.
Pilots will be tested with relevant Mexican institutions in near real-world conditions, using synthetic or non-personal data rather than live cases. Alongside funding, you'll get:
Innovation coaching — support from Frontier Tech Hub coaches to plan focused, learning-led sprints and test your riskiest assumptions first.
Technical support — specialist child protection and technology expertise.
Access to institutions — opportunities to test with, and present to, government, law enforcement and specialist civil society partners, including through workshops and simulations.
A cohort of peers — other pilot teams tackling different parts of the same problem, sharing what they learn as they go.
What we’re looking for
We want tech-enabled approaches that tackle a concrete bottleneck in Mexico's OCSEA response, across any of its four pillars:
Prevent — stopping abuse before it occurs.
Protect — identifying children at risk and protecting them from harm.
Pursue — detecting, investigating and prosecuting offenders.
Prepare — supporting survivors and limiting further harm.
Proposals can fall into one of two categories:
Exploring a need — you have a specific, well-evidenced hypothesis about an unmet need in the OCSEA response, a hypothesis for how this technology-enabled solution could meet this need, and access to the people and institutions who would use a solution, but the technology itself is still early-stage.
Testing or adapting an existing solution — the technology is already in use, in OCSEA or an adjacent field such as gender-based violence, justice or digital safety, and the main question is how it adapts to and integrates with Mexico's response.
Regardless of the categories, we expect that solutions will be looking to use this as an opportunity to test and learn about the solution. You will be expected to have considered your solution from a range of perspectives, including which unmet needs and problems it addresses, and demonstrate an awareness of what needs to be explored or validated through a pilot.
Who can apply
Applications must be led by an organisation legally registered in Mexico. That could be a civil society organisation, social enterprise, start-up, company or academic institution. Consortia that include international partners are welcome, as long as there is a clearly identified Mexican lead.
You'll need to have safeguarding and data protection policies in place and be able to share existing materials that show your work and readiness to pilot, such as research, a prototype, testing results or evidence of engagement with institutions. You don't need to create anything new for the application.
How to apply
Read the information document for applicants here and the evaluation criteria here.
Prepare your answers using the reference copy of the application questions here. The online form can't be saved part-way through, so we recommend drafting offline first.
Submit through the online application form by November 2nd.
If you’d like to dig in further…
🔘 Download our latest report: using tech to enable access to justice
