Initiative for Digital Rights in Latin America (Indela)

The Initiative for Digital Rights in Latin America — known by the Spanish acronym Indela (Iniciativa por los Derechos Digitales en Latinoamérica) — is a USD 1.5 million three-year collaborative re-granting fund launched in 2019 to strengthen the digital-rights ecosystem in Latin America. It was established under strategic direction from Fundación Avina, Luminate, and the Open Society Foundations, with additional support from the Ford Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and was administered operationally out of Fundación Avina in Panama. Indela's three stated goals are to equip digital-rights actors with the resources they need to do their work, promote collaboration between digital-rights organisations across the region, and strengthen coordination among funders and organisations in Latin America, with priority themes spanning privacy, freedom of expression (including internet shutdowns and content regulation), corporate and governmental accountability for digital systems, and access to knowledge. The initiative's own framing of its purpose is the diagnosis that "funding and support to civil society will avoid duplicate responses and will be based on accurate diagnosis and identified needs" in a region where digital-rights challenges share common threads across countries but require locally-grounded approaches rather than imported solutions from the Global North.

A pooled vehicle administered out of Avina, not an endowed foundation

Indela's structural shape is distinct from the endowed grantmaking foundations that anchor much of the rest of this corpus's funder slice. It is a pooled re-granting vehicle: Fundación Avina holds the operational lead-institution role (the IDRC project record names Fundación Avina as the lead institution, with IDRC project number 109129 and a CAD 332,300 IDRC contribution across the 24-month IDRC-side window ending April 2022), the three strategic-direction funders (Fundación Avina, Luminate, the Open Society Foundations) sit on a Steering Committee that sets direction, and the Ford Foundation and IDRC supply additional capital without sitting at the strategic-direction table. Day-to-day programme leadership runs through Sara Fratti as Program Coordinator on the Avina side and Gabriela Hadid as Luminate's Steering Committee representative, with an Advisory Council of Latin American digital-rights practitioners — Adriana Labardini, Carlos Cortes, Paulina Gutiérrez, and Ramiro Álvarez Ugarte, with Guilherme Canela as an International Observer — providing field-side review of grant decisions. The fund's four guiding principles — boldness and innovation, a Latin American perspective, commitment and integrity, and dialogue and connection — read as the institutional articulation of the same diagnosis that produced the fund in the first place: Latin American digital-rights work requires Latin-American-anchored convening, not pass-through funding administered from elsewhere.

Grantmaking architecture and the three-year cohort

Indela's grant parameters during the 2021 open-call cycle ran "up to USD 25,000, for a maximum of 6 months" for legally established organisations based in Latin America, with the project-type framing limited to "public campaigns, applied research and/or public policy advocacy actions, at a national or regional level." Successful applicants received consultancy services in communications, litigation strategy, security, and fundraising alongside the grant — the same non-financial-support architecture that several other in-corpus re-granting vehicles use to compensate for the small dollar size of individual grants. Over the initiative's first three years (2019–2022) Indela supported 20 projects across 22 organisations in 10 Latin American countries, with the recurring thematic clusters being online gender-based violence, personal data protection, privacy, and surveillance-technology analysis.

The grantee roster published on Indela's own projects page is the corpus's most concentrated view of which Latin American civil-society organisations were resourced to do digital-rights work through the strategic-direction-funder relationships behind Indela. Mexico-anchored work appears in R3D's strategic digital-rights litigation grant, Luchadoras's justice-access work for survivors of digital violence, Cultivando Género's information-and-support work in Aguascalientes, and Amaranta's "Urgent Digital Violence Law" campaign. Brazilian work appears in InternetLab's biometric-technology-and-human-rights research, IDEC's consumer-defence-and-digital-rights work, and the LEMA + InternetLab "REMIX" copyright-reform conversation. Argentine work appears in Democracia en Red + ODIA's information-security vulnerability-reporting platform and Fundación Vía Libre's information-security-and-fundamental-rights grant. Bolivian work appears in Fundación Internet Bolivia + Asociación Aguayo's training-and-regulatory-framework work for women activists and indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. Other named grantees include TEDIC (Paraguay, personal data protection legislation), IPANDETEC (Central America, mass video surveillance analysis), Hiperderecho (Peru, gender justice for LGBTQI+ persons in digital violence cases), Fundación Karisma (Colombia, electoral technology awareness), DataUy / DATYSOC (Uruguay, internet intermediary responsibility policies), and the regional-level Al Sur Coalition (unified digital-rights advocacy) and Artículo 19 (freedom of expression and internet censorship). The grantee shape — concentrated on national-level civil-society organisations doing campaign, research, and litigation work, with two regional-coalition entries — is what gives Indela its position in the corpus as the first observable mechanism through which the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Luminate collectively reached Latin American digital-rights organisations smaller than they typically grant to directly.

Operating status and the absence of a published second phase

Indela's news archive last published activity in December 2022, preceded by a June–August 2022 cluster of retrospective posts marking the close of the three-year cycle (the 10 June 2022 "20 projects • 3 years of learning" post is the explicit retrospective). No publicly announced second-phase open call has appeared since. The website remains preserved as a record of the initial cycle and the FAQ page still describes the 2021 grant parameters in present tense, but the absence of post-2022 grantmaking news, of a successor open call, and of any leadership-transition or programmatic-renewal announcement is the most defensible read that the initial 2019–2022 USD 1.5 million cycle ran its course as designed and was not converted into an ongoing institutional grantmaker. The strategic-direction funders behind Indela — Fundación Avina, Luminate, and the Open Society Foundations — have all continued direct grantmaking on Latin American digital rights through their own institutional vehicles; the corpus's Fundación Avina entry already records Avina's own continued positioning around Latin American digital rights and its September 2025 internal AI policy. Indela's value to the corpus is therefore primarily as a documented example of how the field's largest funders pooled capital to reach Latin American civil society over a defined three-year window, rather than as a currently active grantmaker readers should expect to find issuing grants in 2026.

Position in the corpus funder slice

Within the funder slice of this corpus, Indela is the first Latin-America-headquartered, multi-funder-pooled re-granting vehicle of any kind. The most direct structural analogues elsewhere in the corpus are the African Digital Rights Fund — a pan-African re-granting programme hosted at CIPESA in Kampala, with a rotating donor coalition and a small-grants posture similar in shape to Indela's, though ADRF continues to run rolling rounds where Indela's three-year window closed — and the European AI & Society Fund, the multi-funder pooled vehicle for European AI-and-society civil-society work co-founded by Luminate, Stiftung Mercator, the Open Society Foundations, the Mozilla Foundation, and others. The three together — Indela for Latin America, the European AI & Society Fund for Europe, ADRF for Africa — are the corpus's three regionally-anchored multi-funder pooled vehicles and document a recurring philanthropic-collaborative architecture that the field's largest funders have used to reach civil-society actors in regions they find hard to fund directly. Indela's distinctiveness inside that trio is its closed three-year cycle: it is the corpus's first example of a multi-funder pooled vehicle that ran to a defined endpoint rather than into an open-ended institutional life.

Indela is also the second Latin American funder entry in the corpus, joining Fundación Avina — the convening foundation that administered Indela operationally. The two entries are deliberately distinct: Avina is the Pan-Latin American endowed operating foundation whose strategic-direction role in Indela is one of multiple Latin American programme threads, and Indela is the specific pooled-vehicle instrument through which a multi-funder coalition resourced Latin American digital-rights civil society over a defined window. Together they give the corpus its first documented case of how regional philanthropic infrastructure for Latin American digital rights is built — a Latin-America-headquartered convening foundation pooling capital from Luminate, the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and IDRC, then re-granting it through an Advisory Council of Latin American digital-rights practitioners to organisations like R3D — which is the convening shape the corpus's existing Latin American work-product entries (the Derechos Digitales–anchored Decisiones automatizadas en América Latina report, the Coding Rights work, and the surrounding voices) have been operating against in the background.