ACIH 2023 Transform East Africa Fund For High Impact Enterprises

Eligibility Criteria

To receive funding from TRANSFORM, projects must meet all of the following criteria.

• Have a clear potential to create positive impact on low-income people’s lives in one of the six areas that TRANSFORM funds.
  • East Africa Selection Panel can choose to focus on a few or all these priority areas. It is mandatory that projects must link back to at least one of the chosen impact areas.

Tackle social and environmental challenges in a genuinely innovative way.

• Projects must include a new technology, business model or approach – this could involve taking a proven business model to a new market.
• Have the potential to operate in areas relevant to Unilever’s expertise and capability as the implementing partner and where Unilever can add value to the project development.
  • Projects must be relevant to Unilever East Africa specifically.
• Will generate global public goods through contributing to public knowledge or research.
  • We must transparently publish learnings from the programme.
  • Intellectual property generated from the projects will vest with the social entity.
  • Unilever, the FCDO and EY cannot have exclusive use of this intellectual property.
• Have a plan to create a market-based solution with the potential to reach operational sustainability.
  • The application must come from a social enterprise, rather than an NGO.

Have a potential to reach scale

• There must be clear pathway for the proposed project to be commercially viable at scale, with assumptions which can be tested through the project in order to secure follow-on funding.
• The enterprise must have sufficient capacity to effectively deliver the project and to absorb the financing and in-kind support provided during the project

All projects funded by TRANSFORM must demonstrate additionality, in other words, we must not use TRANSFORM funding to fund initiatives that Unilever would have funded alone. Unilever cannot receive TRANSFORM funds to run internal projects and funds must be provided to third parties only.

Projects must also demonstrate that they are additional using at least one of the criteria below:

• Projects scoped to specifically reach low-income consumers.
• Projects being applied in new geographies.
• Projects where there is a first mover disadvantage.
• Projects with payback periods longer than normal commercial business cases.
• Projects with high-risk profiles.

These terms and conditions (the “Terms”) govern your entry into the Programme. By submitting an entry or idea in any form to the programme you agree to these Terms.

Each entry must:

• Have the name and contact details of those entering;
• Include all other information required on the entry form;
• Be from within Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia;
• Be submitted to us on or before the challenge submission deadline

Offered Benefits

Minimum of 2 to Maximum of 5 top startups will be awarded between 100,000 GBP to 300,000 GBP grant to further strengthen their startup innovation and allow them to scale.

Application Process