Builders of Africa’s Future (BAF) 2025 – Cohort Eight – YOA

Deadline: March 21, 2025

Applications are open for the Builders of Africa’s Future (BAF) 2025 – Cohort Eight. Builders of Africa’s Future (BAF) celebrates innovation and affect in early-stage African enterprises. The program identifies African entrepreneurs operating early-stage nonprofits or for-revenue companies that handle key group wants by expertise or differentiated enterprise fashions. The aim is to assist scale their ventures and affect within the areas of well being, schooling, power, agriculture, monetary inclusion, gender inclusion, diet, commerce, industrial growth, and different socioeconomic items.

The BAF program yearly awards 15 to twenty of Africa’s most promising entrepreneurs with enterprise growth coaching, mentorship, and networking alternatives, and a platform to spice up model visibility and funding potential in Silicon Valley. Since 2018, Builders of Africa’s Future has acknowledged and catalyzed 78 African startups.

Benefits

• Training from enterprise coaching companion, the African Management Institute (AMI) of Kenya.
• Invitation to attend the eleventh African Diaspora Investment Symposium–attendees are chargeable for protecting all prices.

Eligibility

Founders and executives of corporations contributing to the nicely-being of communities throughout the continent are the Builders of Africa’s Future. These leaders are catalysts of developmental progress on the continent and have tales and enterprises that they search to amplify.

Primary choice standards for builder enterprises:

• Must be a longtime authorized entity already in operation for six months or extra with demonstrable early traction evidenced in rising utilization, income, or different metrics (not a pitch or prototype). The enterprise ought to have an internet site, tangible digital or bodily product, or image of a couple of profitable occasion over greater than 6 months.
• Must be an revolutionary strategy to serve unmet wants on the continent or handle its challenges. The innovation should match inside the African cultural and socioeconomic context and can’t be a clone of a Western expertise or enterprise answer with out differentiation.
• The entrepreneur should be capable to attend the digital enterprise growth classes and agree to finish 2 core modules 2 weeks earlier than commencement. The coaching classes will probably be supplied by the African Management Institute (AMI).
• The entrepreneur have to be in a position and accessible to attend 2 onboarding classes facilitated by ADN.

Secondary concerns in choosing builders:

• Balanced gender illustration amongst entrepreneurs in recognition of the sizable portion of African girls entrepreneurs.
• Reasonable geographic distribution. Africa consists of 54 international locations North, West, East, Central, and Southern areas. Builders ought to symbolize an inexpensive distribution throughout these areas.
• Africa has a number of non-English talking international locations that we endeavor to symbolize, i.e. there’s a vital Francophone and Arabic bloc.
• They search affect and innovation throughout sectors so they need to keep away from over-indexing on anybody of them – e.g. a number of agro or power corporations.
• Africa’s growth is 2-pronged, leveraging each for-revenue and nonprofit organizations alike. The builders ought to symbolize each genres of enterprises.

Application

The application deadline is March 21, 2025 11:59 PM (PDT).

Click here to apply

For extra data, go to Builders of Africa’s Future.