Ignite: test and validate, fast

What we’re looking for in Ignite Africa Cohort 1

Climate change is straining food and agriculture at every step of the value chain.

Smallholder farmers are often hit first and hardest by drought, erratic rainfall, and flooding, with limited ability to absorb the impacts of a failed season. Further along the chain, rising temperatures can increase food spoilage, while floods disrupt the roads and infrastructure needed to move products to market. As much as a third of the food grown in sub-Saharan Africa is lost before it ever reaches a plate, much of it due to heat and inadequate storage, and a warming climate is making these challenges worse.

Ignite Africa Cohort 1 focuses on food and agriculture value chains, everything involved in growing, moving, storing, processing, and selling food, and the climate pressures affecting each step.

We’re looking for founders building tools and solutions that help farmers and agribusinesses prepare for, withstand, and recover from these climate-related shocks.

Who can apply?

Ignite Africa is open to early-stage micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), startups, social enterprises, or other founder-led ventures developing solutions that strengthen climate adaptation and resilience in food and agriculture value chains. Regardless of legal structure, applicants must have a business model that generates, or credibly moves toward, earned revenue from customers. Enterprises whose primary funding source is donor grants or donations are not eligible. 

Company registration is not required to apply for Ignite, though applicants are strongly encouraged to be registered or have concrete plans to register before the program ends. 

Large corporations and mature organizations with commercially established products operating at scale are not the primary target of this cohort.  

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Solution areas we support

Here are some sample solutions we seek to support, grouped by where they sit in the value chain. If your solution helps farmers, agribusinesses or food systems adapt to climate pressure, it likely belongs here even if you don’t see it spelled out.

Specifically, we refer to adaptation solutions as solutions that help people, enterprises, or food systems anticipate, withstand, recover from, or adapt to current and future climate impacts. 

Eligibility note: We accept processing and sales solutions when they clearly help smallholder farmers adapt, for example by cutting losses or capturing more value, not on efficiency alone.

The AI opportunity in food and agriculture

AI isn’t a requirement, and it isn’t the point. Adaptation is. But across food and agriculture, AI is making things possible that used to be too hard or too costly: reading satellite and field data to lend to a farmer with no credit history, spotting crop disease from a phone photo before it spreads, setting insurance payouts automatically from rainfall data, or turning a weather forecast into specific planting advice in a farmer’s own language.

In some ventures, the AI model is the product. In many more, it quietly makes an existing tool work better, cost less, or reach more farmers. During Ignite, you’ll get hands-on support to find where AI could strengthen your solution, whether you’re already building with it or have never touched it.

You don’t need to be technical, and you don’t need to be using AI yet. You need to be willing to learn.

What an Ignite Africa Cohort 1 venture looks like

We are looking for ventures at the prototype and pre-validation stage. Applicants should have a functional prototype of a product, service, or technology that has moved beyond the idea stage and is ready to be tested with real users in real-world conditions.

Solutions may have been demonstrated in controlled or lab settings, but real-world field testing with target users has not yet taken place. To make it concrete, here are the kinds of teams we’d expect to see. The details are illustrative.

• You’ve built a solar-powered cold room and set one up at a local market. Now you want to test whether traders will pay to store produce in it, and measure how much spoilage it prevents.
• You’ve built an app that turns local weather and soil data into planting advice in a farmer’s own language. It works in demos. You haven’t yet put it in farmers’ hands across a full season.
• You’ve developed a way to judge a smallholder’s creditworthiness from satellite and mobile-money data, so they can finance inputs without a credit history. The model runs, but it hasn’t been tested with a real lender and real farmers yet.

Ignite Journey