Kenya Films and Classification Board has launched a digital literacy program to help parents and guardians improve their skills on how to protect children from online harm in their care.
The program was launched yesterday as Kenya joined the world to mark World Safe Internet Day.
The Agency said the move was necessitated by the information gap that it discovered to be existing between parents and their children.
The program, seeks to promote responsible digital parenting and viewing practices among consumers of internet content.
It also seeks to empower parents with skills on how to monitor and guide children on content access through various digital platforms as well as enhance parents’ awareness on emerging technologies.
Speaking during the launch, Emmah Irungu of KFCB said through collecting data from their classification and regulatory duties, they realized that children know more than the parents when it comes to digital literacy and being tech savvy.
With this, she said, parents protecting their children online becomes an impossible task.
She added that the program is not for parents and guardians only but for teachers also as they spend a lot of time with the children in school.
A study by UNICEF in 2021 found that two-thirds of internet-using children had not been taught how to stay safe online.
Further, it indicated 57 percent of children had shared their personal information with strangers, while 42 per cent reported having accessed sexual images or videos on their media feeds.
In addition, 16 percent of children had actively searched for sexual-related content online with 33 percent inadvertently accessing such content.
The agency has partnered with Google, TikTok and Netflix in this initiative to bridge this knowledge gap among parents for some features that are embedded on these platforms children are accessing,
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