Deadline: 30-Jun-20
Grand Challenges Africa (GC Africa) is a scheme of the African Academy of Sciences’ (AAS). The scheme seeks to promote Africa-led scientific innovations to help countries better achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by awarding seed and full grants to the continent’s most impressive solutions.
The goal of this call is to catalyze scale and sustainability – so that the bold ideas we support are closer to having big impact in a sustainable manner by the end of the funding term.
Grand Challenges and partners (Grand Challenges Explorations by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, USAID- Center for Development Innovation, Grand Challenges South Africa and Grand Challenges Africa) have collectively invested seed funding of up to $140 million in 490 innovative projects in Africa to develop solutions in health and development. A survey of the 490 legacy projects was conducted by Grand Challenges Africa in November 2018 to determine their progress and important components of support that are needed to enable them transition to scale. Scale up funding was cited as the key need with 85.3% of the respondents stating the need for scale up funds and matching funds. Extension of a validated model to other jurisdictions and geographies, large scale production, establishment of necessary infrastructure for scale and business development were the key fund utilization areas as pointed out by a total 60% of respondents.
Objectives
- Identify the most promising innovations in the field of health and development in Africa that have gone beyond proof of concept.
- Support widespread replication and/or adaptation of the innovations across large geographies and populations for transformational impact (scaling).
- Promote Africa-led scientific innovations to help countries better achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by awarding Innovation Transition Grants (ITG) to the continent’s most impressive solutions. This is as a follow up to initial Innovation Seed Grants (ISG) advanced by Grand Challenges partners.
Funding Information
The funding available for the various levels of Transition to scale are as follows:
- Transition to scale 1 (TTS 1)-From $100,000 to $250,000
- Transition to scale 2 (TTS 2)-From $250,001 to $500,000
- Transition to scale 3 & 4 (TTS 3 & 4) -From $500,001 to $1,000,000
The selected innovators will be funded through grants or a blend between Grant and debt.
AAS will NOT fund
- Programmes that do not show proper plans for Transition of Scale on the innovation pathway and those that are merely capacity-building initiatives, ongoing programmatic funding or infrastructure development.
- Projects that involve establishing proof of concept of innovations.
- Projects that have their core intellectual property rights owned by a third-party institution, unless either: (a) the third-party institution has granted the applicant sufficient license rights to the innovation to permit eventual scaling in relevant countries, or (b) the third-party institution is willing to sign an undertaking to Grand Challenges Africa.
Eligibility Criteria
- Non-profit organization, for-profit company, or another recognized institution that is incorporated in an eligible jurisdiction in Africa and can receive and administer funding. Please note that they must approve any changes in applicant organization from the originally-funded grant.
- Founders or PIs should be African Citizens or residents of Africa. Where there is local international ownership, applicants should have adequate control to make executive decisions about the project. They should demonstrate a strong grip on research expertise (being the PI or collaborator) and ownership of the venture.
- Previous or current grantee of various organizations including Grand Challenges family (Grand Challenges Explorations by Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Africa, USAID- Centre for Development Innovation, Grand Challenges Canada, Grand Challenges South Africa and Grand Challenges Ethiopia), other innovation incubators and accelerators and partners who align with Grand Challenges Africa priorities will be invited to recommend innovators in their pipeline to apply for the funding.
For more information, visit AAS.