What Funding Collaboration Tells Us about the State of Urban Innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa
What becomes possible when proven innovations stop working in isolation and start combining their strengths to tackle development challenges?
This question sits at the heart of our collaboration grant approach — the belief that partnerships, not solo organisations, produce the most effective answers to complex challenges.
The African Cities Innovation Fund (ACIF) is the latest expession of our collaboration grant approach. We launched our call for applications for ACIF in March 2026, with support from the Judith Neilson Foundation. ACIF offers $75,000 in flexible grant funding and tailored technical assistance to partnerships of innovators to co-design, test, and refine new answers to pressing urban challenges.
The response to ACIF was striking: over 200 applications, a clear signal of the appetite for collaboration in the region. Applications spanned our urban innovation challenge areas (circular production, climate-resilient infrastructure, digital equity, youth employment, transport and joyful spaces) and came from cities across the region, from Nairobi to Lagos to Kampala. Our East African Regional Hub — Villgro Africa and E&K Consulting Firm — played a key role in the ACIF application process, giving them a unique vantage point on the state of urban innovation in the region.
Insights from the African Cities Innovation Fund application process
As hosts of the MLC’s East Africa Regional Hub (EARH), Villgro Africa and E&K Consulting Firm have had the privilege of assessing seven final stage project proposals for the African Cities Innovation Fund (ACIF) – a unique grant programme, delivered by the MLC in partnership with the Judith Neilson Foundation, designed to advance collaborative solutions to multidimensional urban challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa. These projects represent some of the most promising urban innovations emerging in cities across the region, from Nairobi and Kampala in the east, to Kano and Lagos in the west, to Gaborone in the south. The innovations cut across a diversity of sectors and urban challenges, spanning waste management, maternal health, food systems, environmental conservation, arts, infrastructure, early childhood development, and agri-supply chains, representing a cross-section of city life that is rarely captured in a single grantmaking process. Having now selected and contracted ACIF’s final cohort, we share our reflections on what these projects tell us about the state of urban innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
How These Innovations Fit the Wider East African Ecosystem
What particularly stood out to us when reviewing the ACIF applications was how organically embedded these innovations are in their local ecosystems. These are not imported solutions seeking to solve a problem; they are responses that have grown out of relationships, frustrations, and possibilities that communities already understand. Whether it is a waste network working with an informal trader, a women's market cooperative seeking fairer terms, or an arts centre negotiating space with a city road authority, these innovations are legible to the communities they serve.
This matters because ecosystem fit is not a simple matter of addressing the right problem; it is about doing so in a way that the surrounding ecosystem (the people, institutions, networks and resources) can absorb, adapt and sustain in the long term. The ACIF cohort, at its strongest, shows that urban innovators have internalized this. They are not pitching an entirely new ecosystem; they are building from within their existing contexts, and in response to the unique set of dynamics, challenges and opportunities they bring.
Patterns and Themes Across Proposals
Stepping back from individual proposals, four overarching themes emerged during the ACIF application and selection process:
Collaboration is becoming a genuine strategy, not just a funding requirement: What stands out across this cohort is that the most compelling proposals treat their partnerships as the engine of their theory of change, not an add-on to satisfy a criterion. The collaboration is load-bearing – the innovation would not hold without it, and partners have been strategically engaged because they add potential that the lead organization would not be able to achieve in isolation.
Informality as innovation ground: Several proposals engage directly with informal economies – including waste networks, market vendors and informal settlements – recognizing these not as problems to be solved, but as ecosystems with existing logic, leadership, and resilience to be triumphed and worked with.
City governments as partners, not gatekeepers: Multiple project proposals include county or municipal governments as genuine co-designers (Nairobi City County appears in two, for example). This reflects a positive shift in how civil society and private innovators are engaging with urban authorities to achieve impact at scale.
GEDSI was present in all proposals, but unevenly: The proposals that stood out from the crowd treated inclusion not as a reporting category, but as a design principle, with women, youth, and marginalized groups positioned as decision-makers rather than target beneficiaries. This distinction is critical for ensuring long-term impact.
What This Tells Us About the State of Urban Innovation in the Sub-Saharan African Region
The ACIF Phase 2 cohort tells us that the Sub-Saharan African region is in a genuinely transitional moment. The solo-hero model of innovation — a single founder, a single solution — is giving way to something more textured: multi-actor collaborations that are harder to describe in a pitch deck, but far more likely to produce durable change. This is a mark of ecosystem maturity.
At the same time, we observed a persistent tension between ambition and sprint realism. Teams are thinking at the right scale about the problems they are tackling, but the discipline of defining a tight, testable hypothesis within a 10–12 month window, and within a USD 75,000 budget, remains genuinely difficult. This is not a weakness unique to this cohort; it is a sector-wide challenge reflecting chronic financial, political and institutional barriers that innovators face in collaborating for impact. The good news is that the ACIF model – with its structured coaching and mentoring support and iterative sprint structure – is well-designed to meet innovators at this exact inflection point.
A Message to the Wider Ecosystem
To funders, ecosystem builders, and fellow innovators across East Africa, what the ACIF process has shown us is that collaborative innovation is not only an aspiration here; it is already practice. The partnerships in this cohort were not assembled for the purposes of a grant application. They represent sustainable, well-thought-out relationships that have been built over time, across sectors, and in many cases across borders.
What these proposals demonstrate in particular is that ecosystems have moved beyond the solo hero model of innovation. The most compelling ideas are those built on genuine partnerships where each party brings something irreplaceable, where trust has been earned before a proposal is written, and where the innovation is designed to outlast the funding.
We not only want to celebrate that, but be honest about what it takes. Collaboration is difficult. It requires more trust, more communication, and more governance than working alone. Some of the proposals we reviewed showed those seams. But that is precisely why initiatives like ACIF matter: they resource the messy, necessary work of building and strengthening the partnerships that systems change demands.
The innovations being supported and celebrated through the ACIF Programme are not just good ideas. They are evidence that innovation ecosystems in Sub-Saharan Africa are maturing, and that actors are learning, together, how to resource, structure, and sustain the kind of collaborative change that cities in our region urgently need. We look forward to supporting them across the coming year to test and refine their innovations, and collaborate for urban impact at scale.
