Call for Proposals: IFAD Somalia Women’s Market Access Innovation Challenge 2025 – YOA

Deadline: August 31, 2025

Proposals are invited for the IFAD Somalia Women’s Market Access Innovation Challenge 2025. The Open Innovation Challenge is a pivotal initiative designed to reinforce agricultural innovation and empower entrepreneurs in Somalia to deliver concepts to unravel the challenges Somali ladies farmers face in accessing markets.

Women in rural Somalia play a vital function in agriculture however face vital limitations to market entry as a consequence of insufficient infrastructure, restricted monetary assets, restricted entry to agricultural land, systemic challenges, and cultural constraints. These challenges limit their financial participation, limiting alternatives for ladies-led agrobusinesses to scale and thrive. Additionally, ladies entrepreneurs wrestle with entry to financing, enterprise improvement providers, and digital monetary instruments, additional widening the gender hole in financial empowerment.

To tackle these challenges, the Rural Livelihoods Resilience Programme (RLRP) and the Somalia Food Systems Resilience Project (S-FSRP), carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (MoAI) with help respectively from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and World Bank Group, are dedicated to strengthening ladies’s financial participation by way of entrepreneurship, monetary inclusion, and revolutionary options. This consists of enhancing entry to credit score, enhancing market linkages, and offering capability-constructing initiatives to equip ladies with the talents wanted to develop their companies and adapt to market calls for. The program additionally leverages digital monetary providers to extend monetary accessibility for ladies, even these with out web entry, whereas fostering neighborhood engagement and coverage advocacy to create an inclusive financial surroundings.

Benefits

• Selected entrepreneurs will obtain tailor-made enterprise teaching, seed funding for product improvement, help in market entry, and networking alternatives.  

Eligibility

• This open innovation problem calls for proposals from legally registered, rural ladies-led enterprises, in addition to companies with at the least 30 per cent ladies of their management crew.
• Interested candidates ought to have a scalable resolution, in addition to a validated technological prototype to handle the issue they’re proposing to unravel.
• The proposal ought to search to attain a number of of the next outcomes: improve ladies’s entry to agricultural markets; enhance the competitiveness of girls-led agribusinesses; and set up sustainable market linkages by way of innovation and expertise and promote monetary inclusion.

Application

The deadline for submission is August 31, 2025 at 5:00 PM Mogadishu time.

Click here to apply

For extra data, go to Somalia Women’s Market Access Innovation Challenge.