Deadline: 12-Aug-22

Digital Square is pleased to announce its first call for digital entrepreneurs based in Africa interested in working in the health sector. This call seeks to connect local solutions to financial assistance, technical resources, and opportunities to scale for innovative entrepreneurs.

With initial funding from the Bayer Foundation and USAID, the Digital Health Ecosystem project (DHE) will support the sustainability and expansion of digital tools for health by changing how they are built, deployed, and scaled. This opportunity will provide a platform to foster a global network of independent teams collectively building on a common open-source platform. By doing so, developers will have a proven, economically viable digital foundation for their applications.

The call for Expression of Interest (EOI) is open to innovative African start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses, for-profit and non-profit organizations, and individual social entrepreneurs. Applicants should be interested in applying and expanding their software, content, and/or services to the health sector.

Benefits

Benefits to applying through this EOI, qualifying respondents will become part of a continent-wide list that will be shared with donors, investors and implementing partners world-wide. Pending availability of resources, Digital Square will offer to qualifying respondents an organizational capacity self-assessment tool that supports organizations in becoming direct recipients of USAID funding, and be used to mobilize resources among a broader set of partners to support organizational capacity development and facilitate becoming direct recipients of international funding sources.

Additionally, a subset of respondents will be invited to participate in the first round of a DHE funded request for a grant application to:

• Expand your current product offering by leveraging the Community Health Toolkit (CHT), specifically for entrepreneurs located and/or supporting work in Kenya, Mali, Niger and/or Uganda.
• Develop your organizational capacity according to your priorities, including initiatives that unlock new grant funding opportunities from bilateral, multilateral, and private philanthropic donors; and
• Gain exposure to local government buyers of digital tools, as well as other investors in the global health community.

Expected Outcomes

• A published list of promising digital health entrepreneurs in Africa, promoted widely across the global health and global development community and providing new networking and grant funding opportunities.
• A subset of respondents selected for funding per the three above-mentioned domains.
• A subset of respondents completing an organizational self-assessment and, where relevant, enacting steps towards becoming direct recipients of USAID (and potentially other donor) funding.

Eligibility Criteria

The Digital Square invites EOIs from African organizations, businesses, and entrepreneurs with the following profiles:

• Demonstrated ability to support the implementation of software tools and products. •
• An interest in engaging in the digital health space of a country and willingness to work with local governments, private sector health providers and health insurance schemes.
• Willingness to engage populations at scale; including populations that cannot directly purchase from vendors, but may be government beneficiaries.
• Team includes members with software expertise.
• Registered as a formal organization or business in the WHO SSA Region, with sufficient accounting mechanisms to track revenue and expenditures

Those not selected for the initial round of grants, will automatically be considered for future rounds (that may go beyond community health). In particular, the global health mechanisms Digital Square and CHISU may use this list to identify partners for country digital transformation work, and in parallel to making programmatic grants, will support entrepreneurs to become direct recipients of USAID and potentially other donor funds.

For more information, visit https://digitalsquare.org/blog/2022/7/14/open-call-for-digital-entrepreneurs-in-africa