Indigo Trust has taken over the management of a joint hub fund initiative it had with Hivos and Foundation DOEN. It had been part of this group for over two years.
This year the fund has supported ActivSpaces (Cameroon), Hivecolab (Uganda) and iSpace (Ghana) with core funding and mHub (Malawi) and Sensi (Sierra Leone) with seed funding. The fund has also previously supported SwahiliBox (Mombasa, Kenya) and KINU in Tanzania.
With Indigo Trust taking over the management of this joint hub fund initiative, it has renamed the initiative ‘The Technology Innovation Hub Fund for Sub-Saharan Africa’. The fund provides core costs to relatively established hubs and seed funding to groups who aim to grow and strengthen technology communities in country’s or cities where they barely exist.
Indigo Trust acknowledges the important role for technology innovation hubs in supporting local technology driven innovation and they have been supporting hubs across sub-Saharan Africa since 2011. Here’s a list of the hubs they have supported to date in various capacities.
“Through providing state-of-the-art facilities, events, mentorship, training and networking opportunities to technology communities across Sub-Saharan Africa, innovation hubs help to grow, upskill and strengthen technology communities and help them connect to important stakeholders like funders and the corporate sector. In the long-term, we believe this will have a catalytic effect on the quality and quantity of projects being devised across the continent.”
In this new capacity, Indigo will be exploring some programmatic interventions this year to support civic tech innovation coming out of these spaces
