Grand Challenges Africa Grants
The African Academy of Sciences’ AESA team has announced the Grand Challenges Africa Grants. Read more below:
Dear African innovator,
Launching the Grand Challenges Africa Grants
We are happy to announce that with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are committing US$ 7 million for Grand Challenges Africa Grants to fund innovative and bold ideas that will impact on Africa’s health and developmental outcomes over the next five years.
We will have calls for proposals each year, which will give out up to US$100,000 in Innovation Seed Grants for two years to innovators in Africa with any level of experience, working in any discipline in colleges, universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-governmental and non-profit organisations.
Projects which show promising results will be eligible to apply for up to $1 million from AESA or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The first call for proposals opened on 17 November 2016 and is focused on innovators seeking solutions and strategies:
1. To reduce maternal, neonatal and child deaths in Africa
2. For creative communication approaches to inspire African governments to fund R&D.
Please help us get the word out by sharing the announcement to your networks and on your social media channels using the #GrandChallengesAfrica hashtag.
Join the Grand Challenges Africa Innovation Network
Our Grand Challenges Africa Innovation Network (GCAIN) is now operational and provides an opportunity for you to showcase your innovations to potential funders, venture capitalists and governments. The goal is to provide you with a platform, which will offer opportunities to scale up your innovations or to impact policy.
We invite you to register on the African Academy of Sciences Ishango Grant Tracker to join GCAIN.
The Grand Challenges Africa Mentorship Scheme
The Mentorship Scheme seeks to match innovators with early stage, seed and transitioning to scale innovators with experienced peers to enable their innovation outputs to have the maximum impact on health and development.
We will in due course provide a database of mentors. To help us build the database, we invite you to complete our online form if you would like to be a mentor.
If you are an innovator looking for expert guidance to develop your idea or to transition to scale, please complete the mentee form.
Read more about the Mentorship Scheme.
From the African Academy of Sciences’ AESA team
