Opportunity Title: WFP Innovation Stability and Peace Accelerator Program 2024 for startups and Innovators (US$30,000 equity-free grant)

The worldwide crisis of hunger and malnutrition is especially acute in fragile and conflict-affected areas (FCAs), where over 1.5 billion people confront unprecedented risks to their food security and livelihood. The CGIAR, in collaboration with the World Food Program (WFP) Innovation Accelerator, is launching the “Stability-and-Peace Accelerator Programme” to support food, land, and water systems in vulnerable countries.

The WFP Innovation Accelerator Program invites innovators, entrepreneurs, and changemakers to propose ground-breaking solutions that can boost resilience, ensure food and nutrition security, improve climate adaptability, and promote social cohesion and sustainability in conflict-affected and vulnerable communities.

The WFP Innovation Accelerator and CGIAR will support selected teams through a comprehensive program designed to accelerate the development of promising solutions and prepare them for scale. Alongside financial, technical, and business support, this includes the provision of scientific advisory, aimed to improve the innovator’s ability to create a life-changing sustainability impact. The focus is on sourcing and nurturing solutions that are not only innovative but also sustainable and scalable, with the potential to create lasting positive change in some of the world’s most challenging environments.

Requirements

• For this Innovation Challenge, CGIAR and the WFP Innovation Accelerator are on the lookout for both low and high-tech solutions specifically tailored to meet the distinct challenges present in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Settings (FCAs) specifically in Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria, and Yemen.
• WFP also encourages strong “wildcard” entries. We aim to identify and support exceptional innovations from around the world that hold the potential to address these challenges on a significant scale. WFP’s and CGIAR’s current innovation priorities per country are listed below:

Eligibility criteria

• Your organization must be an established legal entity (for-profit, not-for-profit, social business, NGO, INGO).
• Your organization should have a presence or willingness to build a presence in one of the four countries of implementation (Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria or  Yemen). This could take the form of a country office or other permanent presence, subsidiary, long-term operations or partnerships in the country.
• Your innovation addresses one or more of the priority innovation areas related to pressing challenges faced in the humanitarian space of the country of implementation.
• Your innovation should have reached the minimum viable product stage and is gearing up for scale.
• Your innovation should have a clear pathway to scale and a potential plan to implement during the six-month Sprint with the available funding.
• Applicants are expected to have strong intentions to collaborate with relevant humanitarian stakeholders, build relationships with CGIAR country offices, and connect with the innovation ecosystems.
• The applicants should demonstrate a clear need for research and development for the conceptual and commercial development of their innovation.

Benefits

• Six-month Sprint acceleration program combining business-oriented training, mentoring, and science-based technical assistance from the WFP Innovation Accelerator
• Access to the research network of CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded research-for-development organization
• In-country strategy workshop to kick off implementation
• US$30,000 equity-free grant for each of the winning innovations with a proven sustainable business model and scaling plan
• Exposure to national and international funders
• Post-acceleration support

Deadline: February 16, 2024