UNHCR Refugee-led Innovation Fund 2025 for refugee-led organizations – Opportunities For Africans

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Application Deadline: 22 August 2025 at 23:59 Panama time.

Applications are actually open for the 2025 UNHCR Refugee-led Innovation Fund. The Refugee-led Innovation Fund champions the creativity of all displaced and stateless individuals. It goals to reshape their participation within the supply of humanitarian work by making certain they take centre stage within the selections affecting their lives, main the identification of wants and the design of modern options.

The Fund offers holistic assist – combining monetary assets, mentoring, and different experience – on to organizations led by forcibly displaced and stateless individuals, to allow them to design and ship new interventions which have an enduring optimistic impression on their communities.

Requirements

• The Fund helps innovation by all organizations led by individuals with lived expertise of compelled displacement or statelessness – together with refugees, asylum-seekers, the internally displaced, returnees, and stateless individuals – which might be acknowledged inside their communities as a consequence of their previous important contributions.
• Applicants are required to apply as a crew, representing an present group made up of a number of neighborhood members. Organizations should exhibit a collective construction to qualify. Individual candidates will not be eligible.
• The Fund accepts functions from each registered and unregistered organizations which might be well-known of their communities as a consequence of their previous important contributions and initiatives.
• Additional consideration will likely be given to making sure organizations led by LGBTIQ+ individuals, girls, individuals with disabilities, internally displaced and stateless people, Indigenous populations, and different underrepresented teams obtain assist and encouragement to apply to the Fund.

Benefits

Selected organizations can anticipate the next:

• Financial assist: Organizations can apply for as much as 45,000 USD (equal in native foreign money) in funding to check and implement concepts with robust community-based approaches that generate worth for neighborhood members, not particularly linked to any thematic space or know-how.
• Programme and venture administration assist: Supported organizations will obtain help from UNHCR and consultants to assist construct their capability to design and implement programmes successfully.
• Technical assist and experience: Needs-based specialist recommendation will likely be supplied, on subjects starting from know-how to authorized assist and innovation methodologies.
• Peer-to-peer networking: Supported organizations will likely be inspired to have interaction with one another, share experiences, study from one another, and discover partnerships.
• An emphasis on studying: Support will likely be supplied to allow supported organizations to measure outcomes, assess their progress, and collect info to assist development. They will likely be inspired to doc, share, and make use of related learnings. Discussion and reflection with their communities will allow them to include and reply to suggestions.

Other assist, primarily based on venture wants, may embody organizational assist, assist with venture sustainability and scale, coaching on particular subjects, enterprise mannequin recommendation, and media and communications assist. 

How to apply

Each 12 months, we launch a brand new name for functions inviting organizations to submit a proposal by means of this online platform. In their proposal, organizations ought to define the problem they purpose to deal with, their proposed resolution, a finances, and the modifications they anticipate to see of their communities on account of their venture. In 2025, functions are open till August 22.

These proposals undergo a four-phase choice course of: 

1) Proposal longlisting: The Innovation Service opinions all submissions and identifies a longlist of promising functions. 

2) Vetting and due diligence: Longlisted organizations bear an intensive vetting and due diligence course of to verify their eligibility. Part of this course of entails verifying that every group’s management includes at the least 50% people with lived expertise of compelled displacement or statelessness. Supporting documentation have to be supplied to confirm this. Failure to fulfill this requirement or to supply the required documentation will lead to disqualification from the application course of. 

3) Pitch your concept: Organizations that go the vetting and due diligence course of will likely be invited to pitch their concepts to a range committee composed of members of the UNHCR Innovation Service, in addition to representatives from the related UNHCR Country Operations and Regional Bureaus. This is a chance for organizations to broaden on their submitted proposal and interact in a dialog about their concept. Organizations that efficiently defend their concept will likely be shortlisted and transfer to the ultimate part of the choice course of. 

4) Final choice: Shortlisted proposals are reviewed by the Fund’s Steering Committee, which consists of forcibly displaced and stateless people, representatives of related UNHCR models on the world degree, and, the place possible, donor representatives. The Steering Committee will choose probably the most promising concepts to be endorsed by the Fund. 

For More Information:

Visit the Official Webpage of the UNHCR Refugee-led Innovation Fund