Water and Energy for Food launches second Southern and Central Africa Call for Innovations
The Water and Energy for Food (WE4F) Grand Challenge Southern and Central Africa Regional Innovation Hub (S/CA RIH) announced this week the opening of a second call for grant funding of up to US$200,000 for entrepreneurs in the region.
The Call for Innovations is an activity under WE4F, that seeks to foster innovation and enhance food security in the region.
This comes as farmers in Africa face many challenges that negatively affect food production and livelihoods. Further, the objective of the WE4F initiative is to scale the solutions of innovators who address this challenge.
The S/CA RIH second Call for Innovations is open to enterprises, nonprofits, and academic organizations that for-profit programmes. Accordingly, applicants should have a water-food, energy-food, or water-energy-food solution that can help smallholder farmers sustainably grow more food while using fewer resources.
This call will support up to 30 organizations working on innovative technologies and business model solutions to provide more sustainable water or energy solutions for climate-resilient agriculture.
“The selected organizations will receive customized support in the form of technical assistance, investment facilitation, enabling ecosystem support, and grants of up to US$200,000 to scale their businesses, combat resource scarcity, and foster the transition to sustainable, climate-resilient agricultural sectors,” said Tebogo Masombuka, Communications, and Knowledge Management Specialist at Tetra Tech.
The first Call for Innovation has already funded eight innovators this year, and their target is to increase that number. In addition to the grants, innovators will receive technical assistance and investment facilitation.
According to Masombuka, the second S/CA Call for Innovations opens on 19 August 2022 and closes on 16 September 2022. She said winners will be announced in the first quarter of 2023.
“If you are interested in applying, please visit www.we4f.org/apply-sca for more information. The Q&A webinar will take place on 31 August 2022. Submit questions for the Southern and Central Africa Regional Innovation Hub Team at [email protected],” she added.
“Through this support, the hub enables organizations to scale their impact by enabling smallholder farmers in the region, particularly women, to produce more food, and increase their profits while strengthening their resilience to climate change,” she stressed.
“The Q&A webinar will take place on August 31th, 2022. Submit questions for the Southern and Central Africa Regional Innovation Hub Team at [email protected].”
WE4F is an international partnership between the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Union, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of the Netherlands, Sweden through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). WE4F aims to increase food production, impact gender and poverty, and promote biodiversity, climate, and environmental resilience by sustainably scaling solutions to meet the challenges in the water-energy-food nexus.
The S/C Africa RIH is operated by three leading international organizations (a consortium of Tetra Tech, Open Capital Advisors, and International Water Management Institute (IWMI) who have many years of experience advocating for inclusive and equitable economic growth, gender equality, sustainable agriculture, and the sustainable use of energy, water, and other natural resources in the region.
