Newsroom

Loy Ehlers to speak on operationalizing safety at the interaction layer

ChildSafe.dev chief operating officer and general counsel Loy Ehlers will speak in the SDG09 webinar series on 16 September 2026, in a session titled Building Safer Digital Worlds: Operationalising Safety at the Interaction Layer. The series is convened by SDG09 AI Governance with Fujitsu, and hosted by Dixon Siu, who leads AI governance at Fujitsu and organizes children’s online safety work across industry and civil society.

The session addresses the gap between policy and practice: how interaction environments can be designed to reduce harm, enable respectful engagement and preserve user agency, rather than relying on written policy to produce safety after the fact.

“Policies alone are not enough to create safer digital environments.” The discussion covers detecting risk as it happens, the limits of policy, and preventative architecture — the argument that safety has to be built into the layer where interactions actually occur.

The webinar runs at 8:00am US Eastern, 1:00pm GMT+1 and 9:00pm Tokyo, reflecting the international makeup of the SDG09 community, which includes colleagues at AfroLeadership and the Africa Child Online Protection Programme — a ChildSafe.dev partner in Cameroon.

RoseShield named a semi-finalist in the LBS MENA Startup Competition 2026

ChildSafe.dev has been selected as one of twenty semi-finalists in the London Business School MENA Startup Competition 2026, from a field of more than six hundred applicants across the Middle East and North Africa.

The competition is run by London Business School’s Entrepreneurship Clubs and supported by the School’s Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital, connecting founders in the region with investors, mentors and the LBS network. Entrants are assessed on the strength of the technology, the size of the problem and evidence of traction.

The selection follows the cooperation framework agreed with the Emirates Safer Internet Society and reflects growing regional interest in child-safety technology that starts with local processing and limits routine data collection.

Emirates Safer Internet Society signs MoU to explore RoseShield for UAE children

The Emirates Safer Internet Society has signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing a framework of cooperation on digital child safety in the United Arab Emirates. The agreement was signed at eSafe’s Annual General Meeting before the organization’s board members and founders. eSafe is a UAE non-profit licensed under Ministerial Decree No. 915 of 2015, and has shaped the country’s digital safety agenda for a decade.

The signing coincided with a UAE Cabinet resolution issued the same day, setting fifteen as the minimum age for social media use and requiring platforms to verify age under Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2025 on Child Digital Safety, with AI-assisted age estimation among the approved methods. RoseShield starts safety checks on the device, using the cloud when deeper analysis or Guardian support is needed. The approach is designed to keep routine collection to a minimum.

Immediately after the signing, ChildSafe.dev co-founder Steaphen Antony Venansious gave a live technical demonstration to eSafe board members, focused on the privacy architecture and the localised alert flow to parents and institutional safeguarding leads. Both parties emphasised that the framework is for child safeguarding and digital wellbeing only, and is not intended for behavioral advertising, commercial surveillance or unrelated profiling.

ChildSafe.dev and Online Safety Lab sign to deploy the RoseShield Schools Protection Program across South Africa

ChildSafe.dev and Online Safety Lab have executed the agreement to deploy the RoseShield Schools Protection Program and RoseShield Messenger across South African schools. The agreement establishes OS Lab as ChildSafe.dev’s authorized channel partner for South Africa.

OS Lab chief executive Mashilo Boloka has positioned the organization as South Africa’s external research partner for AI governance and online child safety, following the withdrawal of the country’s Draft National AI Policy — a development that raised demand for credible independent infrastructure to advance the child digital safety agenda.

This is the largest international agreement signed to date, and establishes the operational template for further African market expansion.

Ghana Internet Safety Foundation signs to bring RoseShield to Ghanaian schools

ChildSafe.dev has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ghana Internet Safety Foundation, bringing the RoseShield Schools Protection Program to schools across Ghana. GISF leads implementation on the ground and holds the safeguarding relationships with participating schools, education authorities and parents.

GISF has spent years building Ghana’s online safety capability through school outreach, teacher training and public awareness work, and is among the country’s established voices on child protection online. That relationship layer is what makes a deployment work. Detection technology is only useful where someone local is trusted enough to act on what it finds.

RoseShield starts safety checks on the device, with cloud analysis and review available where configured. GISF and participating schools set the safeguarding policy and decide how to follow up on flagged concerns.

Ghana joins ChildSafe.dev’s African schools network alongside South Africa, Kenya, Uganda and Cameroon.

Eveminet brings RoseShield to Kenyan schools

ChildSafe.dev has partnered with Eveminet Communications Solutions Limited, founded by digital safety advocate and educator Evelyn Kasina, to bring the RoseShield Schools Protection Program and RoseShield Messenger to Kenya. Eveminet serves as authorized channel partner for Kenya, with a two-phase deployment beginning in the Nairobi Metropolitan Area.

Eveminet brings more than a decade of operational presence in Kenya’s digital safety, education and youth empowerment sectors. Data handling, deployment standards and joint accountability for safeguarding outcomes are set out in the partnership agreement.

Supported on-device checks can keep working offline, with a connection used for Guardian alerts, updates and configured cloud analysis. The partnership extends ChildSafe.dev’s East African footprint alongside the Online Safety Foundation Uganda program.

Africa Child Online Protection Program agreed with AfroLeadership, beginning in Cameroon

ChildSafe.dev has partnered with AfroLeadership, the Cameroonian civil society organization led by Charlie Martial Ngounou, to establish the Africa Child Online Protection Program — beginning in Cameroon and structured for pan-African expansion. AfroLeadership is the programmatic implementation partner, with MyData Global joining as the data governance and digital rights anchor.

The program combines RoseShield on-device detection, ChildSafe.dev’s platform safeguarding infrastructure and RoseShield Messenger with structured digital literacy curriculum for Cameroonian schools, youth-serving institutions and parents.

MyData Global brings a focus on individual data rights, consent and children’s privacy to the program’s governance work.

Loy Ehlers selected as a judge for the SafeAI Cup in the United Arab Emirates

ChildSafe.dev chief operating officer and general counsel Loy Ehlers has been selected as a judge for the SafeAI Cup, an international AI safety competition held in the United Arab Emirates. The competition convenes researchers, technologists and young innovators working on safety-by-design AI, child digital safety and ethical AI governance, with entries assessed by an international panel drawn from the legal, technical and child protection sectors.

Ehlers brings his seat on the SAFE Governance Council in the AI Governance and Regulatory portfolio, and the operational experience of leading ChildSafe.dev’s international deployments across Africa and the Middle East.

Loy Ehlers appointed to the founding governance council of an international child safety standards body

ChildSafe.dev chief operating officer and general counsel Loy Ehlers has accepted appointment as a founding member of the SAFE Governance Council, holding the AI Governance and Regulatory seat.

SAFE — Safeguarding Architecture for Foundational Environments — is an independent governance body developing a framework for safeguarding in AI-mediated environments. It separates standard-setting, certification and implementation into three structurally independent layers, addressing the conflict of interest inherent in platform self-regulation. The Council consists of six founding domain seats covering clinical safeguarding, academic research, legal and regulatory expertise, technology and security, civil society and survivor advocacy, and insurance and risk.

SAFE’s proposed structure separates standard-setting, certification and implementation, with a focus on child safety, privacy and responsible governance.

Online Safety Foundation Uganda signs first two school pilots in Kampala

ChildSafe.dev has partnered with the Online Safety Foundation Uganda to bring RoseShield to schools in Kampala. Two structured school pilots are signed, the first at Sayidina Abubakar Secondary School. OSFU’s Dr. Sulaiman Kawooya, Director of E-Safety, leads ground-level implementation.

Uganda’s 2024 national census found that children under eighteen make up half of the country’s 45.9 million people, and Kampala has the highest secondary school enrollment rate in the country. Supported RoseShield checks can run on the device offline, while Guardian alerts, updates and configured cloud analysis use an internet connection.

The pilots establish the deployment model and monitoring framework for scaling across Kampala’s wider school network, with national deployment a stated objective of the partnership.

ChildSafe.dev and Online Safety Lab sign for South Africa

Robert McNamara, chief executive of ChildSafe.dev, and Dr. Mashilo Boloka, chief executive of Online Safety Lab, have signed a formal agreement bringing the RoseShield Schools Protection Program and RoseShield Messenger to South Africa.

This is the first ChildSafe.dev program on the African continent, and positions both organizations for coordinated deployment across sub-Saharan Africa.

ChildSafe.dev introduces RoseShield Messenger, a supervised platform for young people

ChildSafe.dev has introduced RoseShield Messenger, a messaging platform built around child-safety tools. It is in pilot with partner organizations serving children and young people.

RoseShield checks supported messages and media within Messenger for safety concerns. Flagged activity can reach the organization’s designated moderators, with risk information and the content or context their safeguarding policy calls for.

Messenger is being piloted with organizations that want to bring young people together with safety checks built into the conversation.