New fund provides $75,000 grants for tech-enabled city options in Africa

The Judith Neilson Basis, an Australia-based philanthropy that deploys tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} throughout Africa and Australia, has partnered with the Million Lives Collective (MLC), a worldwide community backing scaled social ventures, to launch a brand new fund targeted on tech-enabled city options in African cities. 

The African Cities Innovation Fund, unveiled on Wednesday in Nairobi, will difficulty grants of as much as $75,000 to joint groups constructing digital and infrastructure instruments for transport, local weather stress and entry to fundamental providers.

The fund comes at a time when African cities are rising quicker than public infrastructure can maintain tempo. The continent’s city inhabitants is increasing at about 3.5% a yr, the quickest fee globally, and is about to double to roughly 1.4 billion individuals by 2050. 

Enterprise funding for civic and local weather tech has cooled. African startups raised about $2.2 billion in 2024, down greater than 20% from the yr earlier than, with early-stage and non-fintech sectors taking the toughest hit. 

Donors are shifting from backing single startups to testing whether or not partnerships between startups, civic teams and governments can unlock scale with out heavy capital. This fund is a stay check of that shift.

The fund was introduced on the Worldwide Growth Innovation Alliance’s (IDIA) world summit at CcHub-backed iHub. Functions will open in March 2026. Every grant will again the design and pilot of 1 collaborative challenge, moderately than a single organisation working alone.

Organisers consider that many city issues now require greater than solo founders and siloed pilots. Transport, housing, local weather stress, and entry to fundamental providers hardly ever fall inside a single sector. The fund pushes candidates to mix abilities throughout civic teams, startups and public businesses from day one.

“Throughout the continent, innovators, neighborhood organisations, entrepreneurs, artists and public sector actors are already discovering and scaling new methods to enhance mobility, broaden entry to assets and providers, strengthen native economies, create secure and vibrant public areas, and construct resilience to local weather and financial shocks,” Jite Phido, Senior Program Supervisor on the MLC and Outcomes for Growth, mentioned. 

Chosen groups may even obtain technical assist, together with teaching on partnerships and publicity to world growth funders by way of IDIA’s collaboration lab. The intention is to check not solely whether or not concepts work, however whether or not partnerships maintain underneath actual circumstances.

The Million Lives Collective has run earlier collaboration grants since 2022, principally in well being and girls’s financial participation, with backing from the Gates and Bayer foundations. It now desires to shift that mannequin into cities, the place scaling typically breaks as soon as native belief, logistics and public authority come into play.

One previous participant, Kenya’s 4Life Options, which offers secure consuming water to low-income communities, mentioned partnerships have been crucial to transferring from pilot to rollout. Its work underneath an earlier girls’s programme relied on native establishments to drive uptake and behavior change, not simply know-how.

The fund will deal with areas resembling climate-resilient infrastructure, youth mobility, digital entry and neighborhood wellbeing. A separate name to recruit new members into the Million Lives Collective will open in January.