The Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA), created through a partnership between the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) in partnership with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) welcome proposals to address a new Grand Challenge: Promoting and facilitating innovative solutions to achieve Food Security and Nutrition in Africa.

These grand challenge innovation grants will be issued and administered under Grand Challenges Africa (GC Africa), a programme implemented in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This call is focused on the SDG2 targets with the overall objective of enabling and fostering African innovators and researchers to work in local and global collaborative partnerships on the ambitious but achievable goals of accelerating knowledge generation, developing and deploying interventions and innovations that will advance the progress towards ending hunger, achieving food security and addressing malnutrition in all forms.

The call aims to build capacities for Africa to respond to, mitigate and where possible, reverse effects of various challenges to achieving food security and nutrition such as climate change and variability, malnutrition, conflict, economic downturns and price volatility in markets, decline in yields, poor land and water management, including within the context of more recent complex and unprecedented issues of COVID-19 pandemic and locust outbreaks in some parts of Eastern Africa.

Key Areas

Projects that will apply and enable adoption of new technologies, innovations and policies in at least one of the following key areas to:

• Ensuring climate resilient food systems
• Promote technologies, innovations and agribusinesses to achieve food security and nutrition targets
• Address cross-cutting issues that promote food security and nutrition
• Achieve the nutrition and health targets of the African Union
• Tackle sustainable commercialisation and production of indigenous foods

Funding Information

The Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) awards will fund projects up to USD $100,000 for a maximum of 2 years.

Eligibility Criteria

• The call is open to innovators working in African based, domestic organisations, international organisations, government agencies, research and academic institutions.
• Please note that this call is open to both non-profit and profit making organisations.

For more information, visit AAS.