Innovation Hub Announces New Funding Scheme
Staff Writer | Monday March 1, 2021 14:51
The Grand Challenges Botswana is launched in partnership with the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA) - an initiative of the African Academy of Sciences, the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) and Global partners. It is a unique but collaborative initiative under the Grand Challenges Africa (GC Africa) initiative. GC Africa is an AESA programme that awards seed and full grants to the continent’s most impressive innovators to promote Africa-led scientific innovations that help countries better achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The minister of Tertiary Education, Research, Science and Technology, Dr Douglas Letsholathebe said they are at a five-year implementation plan in which they target supporting key projects that will scale commercially, locally and regionally, and building a portfolio with potential to create jobs. “Launching Grand Challenges Botswana today, gives me renewed hope that we are on course towards achieving our national Vision 2036 aspirations,” he said.
For his part, Grand Challenges Africa Programme Manager, Dr Moses Alobo said the partnership with BIH is one of the efforts to establish national Grand Challenges programme. Alobo added it is also to catalyse scientific breakthroughs that have the potential for high impact, scale, and sustainability and finding local solutions to solve Africa’s pressing challenges. Grand Challenges Botswana will provide funding to local innovators to develop and implement bold scientific solutions, starting with its first challenge launched with a call for submission of concept notes for space applications for Agriculture and Tourism sectors and closing on March 11, 2021.
This call is in alignment with Botswana’s national digital transformation initiatives and aims to identify locally developed solutions that demonstrate the use of relevant emerging and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) related technologies.
These solutions include Artificial Intelligence and Big Data analytics in geospatial data benefitting the tourism and agriculture sectors. BIH Director Innovation and Technology, Dr Budzanani Tacheba said local innovators will be a lynchpin to promoting productivity in a myriad of sectors, effectively ensuring they contribute to national efforts to accelerate economic transformation and achieve our six national development priorities.
Botswana’s 11th National Development Plan outlines the country’s six national priorities, namely: developing diversified sources of economic growth; human capital development; social development; sustainable use of national resources; consolidation of good governance and strengthening of national security; and implementation of an effective monitoring and evaluation system. Grand Challenges Botswana is the third in-country programme in Africa after Grand Challenges Ethiopia and South Africa.