Africaid

The Africaid Logo
The Africaid extension popup
Some of the advertisements seen on the new tab page
Our advertisements are randomly displayed from our database
Companies can upload images to be placed on our extension

Inspiration

We were inspired to create Africaid based on pre-existing platforms that rely on sponsorship or ad-based revenue, such as Ecosia.

What it does

The primary purpose of this extension is to generate revenue that can be used to support charity organizations such as the African Library Project. Users will be greeted by a page of tiled advertisements every time they open a new tab. The money generated by sponsorships helps aid important issues concerning Africa. Africaid offers consumers a free and easy method to support literacy and healthcare in Africa, even when they are unable to donate regularly. Companies who want to sponsor ads can learn more on our website and even submit an ad to be placed on our extension. As well, Africaid can be used to educate and raise awareness about issues in Africa, such as illiteracy or poverty. We also promote critical social issues and small businesses.

How we built it

We coded Africaid primarily using HTML, CSS and JS. To host images, we also connected the extension and website to Google Firebase. The site is currently hosted on GitHub. Cloud Firestore hosts the list of pictures and redirect links.

Challenges we ran into

The main problem we ran into was attaching Firebase to the google chrome extension. Google’s Content Security Policy is automatically enabled and disallows inline JavaScript code in the main HTML files. This became an issue, as we were unable to reference external JavaScript documents to initialize Firebase. After a lot of head-scratching and research, we were ultimately able to edit the content security policy in the JSON file to reference certain JavaScript files.

What we learned

By participating in this hackathon, we learned more about front end, back end development and creating chrome extensions. Prior to this project, our team had very limited knowledge of working with databases. By diving headfirst and teaching ourselves as we went, we were able to learn a lot about Google Firebase and Cloud Firestore.

How to install

At the moment, consumers will be able to install Africaid by downloading it on our GitHub repository at https://github.com/askanniething/Africaid and loading it onto their list of extensions. From then on, our extension can control their new tabs.

What’s next for our project

In the future, we hope to add Africaid to the Google Chrome extension store. As well, we may be looking into sponsorships for ads and more secure methods of hosting our files.