The Fund for Internet Research and Development – FIRE Africa – is one of Africa’s leading Grants and Awards programmes designed to encourage, support and develop innovative online solutions to Africa’s education, information, infrastructure and communication needs.
 

Create. Enable. Connect

Even with the lowest Internet penetration rates anywhere in the world, and with one of the largest as-yet unconnected populations anywhere on earth, Africa’s online economy is growing steadily, largely due to the expansion of mobile Internet technologies in the region. We believe that the Internet plays a critical role in Africa’s social and economic development.

Funding

FIRE Africa provides funds in the form of Grants and Awards for projects, initiatives, tools and platforms that harness the power of the Internet to empower the local and regional community to solve the region’s unique online communications problems. Since we ran our pilot project in 2007 to identify innovative ICT solutions to the challenges faced by local communities, FIRE Africa has grown into a fully-fledged programme that has helped over 30 initiatives in 16 countries over the last eight years. Our first full round of Grants and Awards took place in 2013.

Grants and Awards 

Various types of Grants are available to fund new and existing projects with an implementation time frame of around 16 - 20 months. Scale up Grants are also available to help projects with their capacity building efforts and to reach the next phase of implementation. Awards are given to exemplary existing projects in order to help expand operations and to facilitate project promotion, international networking, fund acquisition, scaling and sustainability. Travel awards are also provided to facilitate travel to relevant global platforms, including the prestigious annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), for project promotion and networking purposes.