Founders building climate adaptation or resilience solutions for vulnerable communities, who have built something concrete (an app, device, data model, service protocol) but haven’t yet tested it with real intended users.
We aim for cohorts with at least 40% women in leadership positions (ideally women-led or women co-led), and split roughly 50/50 between AI-first companies (where the model is the product) and AI-embedded companies (where AI sharpens an otherwise traditional solution). You don’t need deep AI experience to apply, just curiosity and willingness to learn and use AI tools during the cohort.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR IN IGNITE AFRICA COHORT 1
Climate change is straining food and agriculture at every step of the value chain.
Smallholder farmers are often hit first and hardest by drought, erratic rainfall, and flooding, with limited ability to absorb the impacts of a failed season. Further along the chain, rising temperatures can increase food spoilage, while floods disrupt the roads and infrastructure needed to move products to market. As much as a third of the food grown in sub-Saharan Africa is lost before it ever reaches a plate, much of it due to heat and inadequate storage, and a warming climate is making these challenges worse.
Ignite Africa Cohort 1 focuses on food and agriculture value chains, everything involved in growing, moving, storing, processing, and selling food, and the climate pressures affecting each step.
We’re looking for founders building tools and solutions that help farmers and agribusinesses prepare for, withstand, and recover from these climate-related shocks.
Who can apply?
Ignite Africa is open to early-stage micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), startups, social enterprises, or other founder-led ventures developing solutions that strengthen climate adaptation and resilience in food and agriculture value chains. Regardless of legal structure, applicants must have a business model that generates, or credibly moves toward, earned revenue from customers. Enterprises whose primary funding source is donor grants or donations are not eligible.
Company registration is not required to apply for Ignite, though applicants are strongly encouraged to be registered or have concrete plans to register before the program ends.
Large corporations and mature organizations with commercially established products operating at scale are not the primary target of this cohort.
Solution areas we support
Here are some sample solutions we seek to support, grouped by where they sit in the value chain. If your solution helps farmers, agribusinesses or food systems adapt to climate pressure, it likely belongs here even if you don’t see it spelled out.
Specifically, we refer to adaptation solutions as solutions that help people, enterprises, or food systems anticipate, withstand, recover from, or adapt to current and future climate impacts.
What an Ignite Africa Cohort 1 venture looks like
We are looking for ventures at the prototype and pre-validation stage. Applicants should have a functional prototype of a product, service, or technology that has moved beyond the idea stage and is ready to be tested with real users in real-world conditions.
Solutions may have been demonstrated in controlled or lab settings, but real-world field testing with target users has not yet taken place. To make it concrete, here are the kinds of teams we’d expect to see. The details are illustrative.
You’ve built a solar-powered cold room and set one up at a local market. Now you want to test whether traders will pay to store produce in it, and measure how much spoilage it prevents.
You’ve built an app that turns local weather and soil data into planting advice in a farmer’s own language. It works in demos. You haven’t yet put it in farmers’ hands across a full season.
You’ve developed a way to judge a smallholder’s creditworthiness from satellite and mobile-money data, so they can finance inputs without a credit history. The model runs, but it hasn’t been tested with a real lender and real farmers yet.
Who can apply?
Ignite Africa is open to early-stage micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), startups, social enterprises, or other founder-led ventures developing solutions that strengthen climate adaptation and resilience in food and agriculture value chains.
