As infrastructure lags, new $75,000 fund targets tech fixes for African cities

The Judith Neilson Foundation, an Australia-based philanthropy that deploys tens of millions of dollars across Africa and Australia, has partnered with the Million Lives Collective (MLC), a global network backing scaled social ventures, to launch a new fund focused on tech-enabled urban solutions in African cities. 

The African Cities Innovation Fund, unveiled on Wednesday in Nairobi, will issue grants of up to $75,000 to joint teams building digital and infrastructure tools for transport, climate stress and access to basic services.

The fund comes at a time when African cities are growing faster than public infrastructure can keep pace. The continent’s urban population is expanding at about 3.5% a year, the fastest rate globally, and is set to double to roughly 1.4 billion people by 2050. 

Venture funding for civic and climate tech has cooled. African startups raised about $2.2 billion in 2024, down more than 20% from the year before, with early-stage and non-fintech sectors taking the hardest hit. 

Donors are shifting from backing single startups to testing whether partnerships between startups, civic groups and governments can unlock scale without heavy capital. This fund is a live test of that shift.

The fund was announced at the International Development Innovation Alliance’s (IDIA) global summit at CcHub-backed iHub. Applications will open in March 2026. Each grant will back the design and pilot of one collaborative project, rather than a single organisation working alone.

Organisers believe that many urban problems now require more than solo founders and siloed pilots. Transport, housing, climate stress, and access to basic services rarely fall within a single sector. The fund pushes applicants to combine skills across civic groups, startups and public agencies from day one.

“Across the continent, innovators, community organisations, entrepreneurs, artists and public sector actors are already finding and scaling new ways to improve mobility, expand access to resources and services, strengthen local economies, create safe and vibrant public spaces, and build resilience to climate and economic shocks,” Jite Phido, Senior Program Manager at the MLC and Results for Development, said. 

Selected teams will also receive technical support, including coaching on partnerships and exposure to global development funders through IDIA’s collaboration lab. The aim is to test not only whether ideas work, but whether partnerships hold under real conditions.

The Million Lives Collective has run earlier collaboration grants since 2022, mostly in health and women’s economic participation, with backing from the Gates and Bayer foundations. It now wants to shift that model into cities, where scaling often breaks once local trust, logistics and public authority come into play.

One past participant, Kenya’s 4Life Solutions, which provides safe drinking water to low-income communities, said partnerships were critical to moving from pilot to rollout. Its work under an earlier women’s programme relied on local institutions to drive uptake and behaviour change, not just technology.

The fund will focus on areas such as climate-resilient infrastructure, youth mobility, digital access and community wellbeing. A separate call to recruit new members into the Million Lives Collective will open in January.