2025 was a big year for Safe Online. We deepened our work on digital harms prevention and expanded our scope to focus on well-being by design, reimagining digital spaces where children don’t just stay safe, but can truly thrive. While protecting children from online harms remains at the heart of our work, we expanded our ambition to focus on what it takes for children to flourish in a rapidly evolving digital world.
This year, we also helped put children’s online safety and well-being on the global investment agenda, making the case that safe and thriving digital futures need sustained, coordinated financing.
Across funding, evidence, and advocacy, we turned bold ideas into action – building momentum, partnerships, and pathways for lasting change for children everywhere.
Our collective effort delivered real-world impact at scale, with measurable results across countries, systems, and children’s lives.
This year, Safe Online stepped up its investment to meet a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
We invested USD 6.7 million across 20 bold, high-impact projects worldwide, USD 1.7 million more than planned, to respond to the growing urgency of tackling technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) and deliver impact where it matters most. The new projects will strengthen the ecosystem by formalizing mental health and survivor support models, advancing early intervention strategies, generating evidence on emerging digital harms, and developing scalable technologies – from child sexual abuse material (CSAM)detection to AI risk assessment.
Alongside this, we launched a new USD 8 million Targeted Call focusing on the areas with the greatest potential for catalytic change: understanding emerging technologies, strengthening prevention and upstream solutions, embedding child safety across digital agendas, scaling what works, and ensuring children’s digital well-being is prioritized in decision-making at every level. The new grants under this Targeted Call will be awarded early next year.
As part of the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund, we funded three new projects focused on generative AI and technology-facilitated CSEA, strengthening the global evidence base. Building on nearly five years of collaboration, this work turns research into action while deepening industry-research partnerships.
In 2025, Safe Online helped shift the global agenda on children’s digital safety from fragmented commitments toward coordinated action, placing financing for safe digital futures firmly at the center. Through targeted advocacy, strategic partnerships, and high-level convening, we helped turn political momentum into pathways for impact.
a strategic platform to reset global financing for children’s digital safety. In the face of rising digital risks and chronic underinvestment, the coalition aims to unlock new funding streams, explore innovative financing models, and support governments in delivering on commitments made at the 2024 Global Ministerial Conference in Bogotá, Colombia– laying the groundwork to scale what works and reach millions of children.
A major moment for the coalition was the High-Level Roundtable on Financing Safe Digital Futures for Children, co-hosted with the Government of South Africa at the G20 Social Summit in Johannesburg in November 2025. The session highlighted the urgent need to move from commitments to coordinated, long-term investments, embedding child digital safety into national budgets, digital economy plans, and multi-sector financing models thus laying the groundwork for an investment roadmap to inform global processes, regional strategies, and national implementation efforts.
Beyond financing, Safe Online strengthened global momentum on digital child safety. One year after the first Global Ministerial Conference in Bogotá, we joined partners to assess progress, elevate digital harms as central to ending violence against children, and build momentum toward the second Global Ministerial Conference in the Philippines in 2026. At UNGA 80, Clinton Global Initiative and AI Africa Village, we reinforced that children’s digital experiences must be designed for safety and wellbeing of all children, not only those in high-income contexts.
We pushed the conversation upstream – from responding to harm to embedding safety and well-being by design, as emerging technologies, including AI, reshape children’s lives. We also strengthened the enabling environment by supporting the Second Edition of the Terminology Guidelines.The new guidelines replaces outdated terms with child-centered language that respects children’s dignity and agency. By guiding policymakers, practitioners, and media, these updates help ensure discussions around child sexual exploitation and abuse protect children rather than cause further harm.
This year, Safe Online strengthened its role as a catalyst for knowledge and network building across the digital safety ecosystem by deliberately connecting evidence–generation with collaboration and advocacy across sectors.
With nine evaluations underway, Safe Online is building a clearer picture of impact, and early findings are already shaping change. DeafKidz International’s evaluation helped secure the Government’s endorsement in Zambia, unlocking wider rollout of the DK Defenders programme in schools, an interactive, game-based initiative designed to help deaf children identify abuse and seek support, including in online environments. The Council of Europe and the Internet Watch Foundation used their evaluation results to convene key actors – turning evidence into learning, dialogue, and action. We also strengthened learning across our community, bringing grantees together through global MEL sessions to share skills and insights.
With new Global South case studies in Kenya and the Philippines underway on how national systems prepare for digital harms and a MEL Community of Practice, for our grantees, launching next year, our focus remains clear: stronger evidence, smarter investments, and greater impact for children worldwide.
The second phase of Disrupting Harm, Safe Online’s flagship initiative, is now coming to light with the launch of the national report in Armenia – the country’s first study on technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse.
The findings show digital exploitation is widespread, underreported, and often invisible, underscoring the urgent need for coordinated national action to keep children safe online. Backed by more than USD 15 million from Safe Online and implemented by ECPAT International, INTERPOL, and UNICEF Innocenti, Disrupting Harm has already generated critical insights across 13 countries and is on track to reach 25 by 2026 – building the most comprehensive global evidence base on how digital harm affects children and how it can be addressed.
Key findings coming in 2026 – Stay tuned for transformative results that will help build a safer digital world!
Through the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund, selected generative AI research projects moved from design into implementation with structured industry engagement, supported by targeted webinars, participation in the Trust & Safety Professional Association APAC Summit, and an in-person convening in Singapore that brought together researchers and practitioners to deepen collaboration and examine Asia-Pacific trends on technology-facilitated CSEA and related harms.
The Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund is a groundbreaking collaboration fuelling actionable research and uniting the tech industry with academia in a bold alliance to end technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse. Launched in 2020, The Tech Coalition has so far invested nearly $3 million in this collaborative effort with Safe Online, supporting 16 cutting-edge research projects.
At the same time, Data for Change sustained and expanded a global community focused on online child safety data through thematic exchanges on data collection, use, and sharing, while spotlighting practical approaches through the Meet the Data Champions series.
Complementing this, the launch of the Voices in Action Advocacy Lab Series created interactive spaces for grantees to co-create advocacy tools, align priorities, and develop a shared narrative – beginning with financing safe digital futures for children – ensuring that knowledge generated across the ecosystem is shared, applied, and translated into coordinated action for children’s digital safety and well-being.
In collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) we laid the groundwork for the first-ever $100 million global fund dedicated to children’s and adolescents’ mental health in the digital world. Together with partners, we have been building the foundations for a robust, trusted funding platform to drive evidence-informed interventions and innovation across three key objectives of mental health: promotion, prevention and treatment.
Backed by $2 million in pre-launch funding and support ICONIQ Capital and Wellcome Trust, the new fund is being designed as an inclusive, globally focused vehicle to support high-impact solutions at the intersection of digital technologies and child and adolescent well-being.
Our ambition is clear: to raise and invest $100 million by 2030 – scaling evidence-based interventions, strengthening partnerships, and accelerating change so children and adolescents are not only protected in a digital world, but enabled to thrive.
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2025 marked a pivotal year for Safe Online.
We expanded our work from digital safety to well-being by design—helping create digital spaces where children can truly thrive.
We are here to ensure every child and young person grows in to the digital world feeling safe, and is protected from harm.
We support, champion, and invest in innovative partners from the public, private, and third sectors working towards the same objective.
We believe in equipping guardians and young people with the skills to understand and see danger themselves once accessing digital experiences without supervision.