African cities are growing faster than their infrastructure can handle. The urban population across the continent expands at about 3.5% annually, the fastest rate globally, and is projected to double to roughly 1.4 billion people by 2050. To address this challenge, a new fund is stepping in with a collaborative approach to urban problem-solving.
The African Cities Innovation Fund launched Wednesday in Nairobi, offering grants of up to $75,000 to joint teams building digital and infrastructure tools for transport, climate stress, and access to basic services.
Behind the Fund: A Partnership Approach
The fund is a partnership between the Judith Neilson Foundation, an Australia-based philanthropy deploying tens of millions across Africa and Australia, and the Million Lives Collective (MLC), a global network supporting scaled social ventures.
The announcement took place at the International Development Innovation Alliance’s (IDIA) global summit at CcHub-backed iHub, signaling strong support from Africa’s tech ecosystem.
Why Collaboration Over Solo Ventures?
Unlike traditional startup funding that backs individual companies, this fund takes a different approach. Each grant will support the design and pilot of one collaborative project bringing together startups, civic groups, and government agencies.
“Across the continent, innovators, community organisations, entrepreneurs, artists and public sector actors are already finding and scaling new ways to improve mobility, expand access to resources and services, strengthen local economies, create safe and vibrant public spaces, and build resilience to climate and economic shocks,” said Jite Phido, Senior Program Manager at the MLC and Results for Development.
The organizers believe urban problems like transport, housing, climate stress, and service access rarely fall within a single sector. They require combined skills and coordinated action from day one, not siloed pilots that struggle to scale.
The Funding Gap in African Tech
The timing matters. Venture funding for civic and climate tech has cooled significantly. According to Tech Cabal, African startups raised about $2.2 billion in 2024, down more than 20% from the previous year. Early-stage ventures and non-fintech sectors took the hardest hit.
Donors are shifting their strategy, moving from backing single startups to testing whether partnerships between startups, civic groups, and governments can unlock scale without heavy capital. This fund represents a live test of that shift.
What the Fund Covers
The African Cities Innovation Fund focuses on several key areas:
Climate-Resilient Infrastructure: Solutions that help cities adapt to climate change, from flooding controls to heat management systems.
Youth Mobility: Tools and platforms that improve how young people move around cities for work, education, and opportunities.
Digital Access: Technologies that expand internet connectivity and digital services to underserved communities.
Community Wellbeing: Projects that enhance public safety, health access, and quality of life in urban neighborhoods.
Transport Solutions: Systems that ease congestion, improve public transit, and make cities more navigable.
How Applications Will Work
Applications open in March 2026. Teams applying must demonstrate how they will combine different types of expertise and organizations. A tech startup working alone won’t qualify; the same startup partnering with a community organization and a city government office would.
Selected teams receive more than just money. The package includes technical support, coaching on managing partnerships, and exposure to global development funders through IDIA’s collaboration lab. The goal is to test not only whether ideas work but whether partnerships hold under real conditions.
Learning from Past Models
The Million Lives Collective has run collaboration grants since 2022, mostly in health and women’s economic participation, with backing from the Gates and Bayer foundations. Now it wants to shift that model into cities, where scaling often breaks once local trust, logistics, and public authority come into play.
One past participant offers lessons. Kenya’s 4Life Solutions, which provides safe drinking water to low-income communities, said partnerships were critical to moving from pilot to rollout. Its work under an earlier women’s program relied on local institutions to drive uptake and behavior change, not just technology.
This experience shows why the fund emphasizes collaboration. Technology alone rarely solves urban problems. It needs community trust, government cooperation, and on-the-ground knowledge to work at scale.
The Infrastructure Challenge
African cities face a basic math problem. Population growth outpaces infrastructure development. Roads, water systems, electricity grids, and waste management all struggle to serve existing residents, let alone accommodate rapid growth.
Traditional infrastructure takes years to build and billions to finance. Digital solutions can move faster and cost less, but they still need to integrate with physical systems and government processes. That’s where partnerships become essential.
Companies like Kinplus Technologies demonstrate how tech firms can bridge digital and physical infrastructure gaps through smart platforms and tools designed for African contexts.
Why This Approach Might Work
Several factors make the collaborative model promising:
Shared Risk: When multiple organizations contribute, no single entity bears all the risk if something fails.
Complementary Skills: Startups bring tech innovation, civic groups bring community knowledge, governments bring regulatory power and scale.
Built-In Distribution: Partnerships create natural channels for reaching users, rather than having to build these from scratch.
Sustainability: Projects with government involvement have better chances of long-term funding and integration into city systems.
Local Context: Community organizations ensure solutions fit actual needs, not what outsiders assume people need.
Challenges Ahead
Collaboration sounds good in theory but proves difficult in practice. Organizations have different timelines, priorities, and decision-making processes. Startups move fast; governments move slow. Civic groups focus on impact; startups need revenue.
The fund’s technical support and coaching will need to address these tensions. Success requires clear agreements upfront about roles, responsibilities, and how benefits get shared.
Another challenge is measuring impact. Is success defined by users reached, infrastructure improved, government policies changed, or business sustainability? Different partners may have different answers.
The Bigger Picture
This fund represents a broader shift in how development funding approaches urban challenges in Africa. Rather than assuming outside experts or individual entrepreneurs have all the answers, it bets on local collaboration.
Platforms like Tech Linkup play a crucial role in this ecosystem by connecting innovators, sharing knowledge, and building the networks that make collaboration possible.
A separate call to recruit new members into the Million Lives Collective will open in January, expanding the network of organizations working on scaled social impact.
What Success Looks Like
If the African Cities Innovation Fund works as intended, it will produce more than good pilot projects. It will demonstrate that partnerships can scale urban solutions where solo ventures have struggled.
Success means city governments adopting tested approaches, civic organizations building lasting relationships with tech companies, and startups finding sustainable business models in civic tech.
It also means creating templates other cities can adapt. Urban challenges vary by location, but successful collaboration models can transfer across contexts.
Moving Forward
African cities need solutions that work at the speed and scale of their growth. The African Cities Innovation Fund offers one approach: combining local knowledge, technical innovation, and institutional power from the start.
Applications open in March 2026. For teams with ideas that require more than one type of expertise, this represents a rare opportunity to test collaborative urban solutions with dedicated funding and support.
The real question is whether partnerships can deliver where individual efforts have fallen short. Over the next few years, the funded projects will provide answers, offering lessons for how African cities can build infrastructure that keeps pace with their ambitions.
