The GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation, which aims to speed up the testing, adoption, and scalability of digital innovations that enable the world’s most vulnerable populations to adapt to, anticipate, and absorb the negative impacts of climate change, has announced the recipients of grants, including eight African startups.
The GSMA Innovation Fund for Climate Resilience and Adaptation, which was established a year ago, is the GSMA’s most recent project after several other targeted ones in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The fund’s goal is to support initiatives that help low-income and vulnerable communities better prepare for, cope with, or absorb shocks or pressures related to the environment. The GSMA received the most proposals in this round’s history, with 524 innovations from 70 different nations requesting funding. In the end, 11 firms were chosen to receive grant funding, eight of which were from Africa.
They include three from Nigeria: Hello Tractor, which models and optimizes tractor service provision using weather and historical tractor service demand data, Crop2Cash, which offers access to agri-insurance and climate smart farming content through a mobile app, and CoAmana, a digital marketplace for farmers to access markets, buy drought-resistant seeds, and other information on best practices and financial services.
Other selected African startups are Kenya’s Aquarech, which uses mobile technology and Internet of Things sensors to enable market access and create an inclusive aquaculture value chain; Egypt’s BENAA, which uses IoT to help turn waste water into irrigation water; Ethiopia’s Lersha, a one-stop advisory service for smallholder farmers; Liberia’s J-Palm, which gives access to ecological information for local harvesters; and Tanzania’s Simusolar, which sustains fish populations.
Other startups hail from Pakistan, Nepal, and the Philippines.
“In catalysing these digital solutions, we hope to generate insights from innovative use-cases, partnerships and business models to improve the sustainability and scalability of digital climate resilience solutions,” the GSMA said.
“In doing so, the GSMA seeks to support this cohort of innovators to realise their full potential and help improve the lives of people vulnerable to climate risks.”
Over the term of the funding, the GSMA will assist these entrepreneurs in growing and realizing their full potential in order to support initiatives to increase climate resilience. This will be accomplished by fostering partnerships with mobile operators and public sector organizations, offering technical assistance on how to reach and better serve communities most vulnerable to climate change, providing tools, templates, and expert advisory support on how to demonstrate socioeconomic and climate impact and promote product improvement, and providing opportunities to raise their visibility to potential investors and partners.
