Village Capital in conjunction with The Lemelson Foundation, iHub’s Gearbox, and The DOEN Foundation, has launched a hardware accelerator programme to enable invention-based hardware businesses that are improving lives of the underserved across Africa scale their ventures, thereby ensuring wider integration and lesser problems. The accelerator seeks to provide cutting-edge training for 12 hardware invention-based ventures to help them overcome challenges that have most times prevented entrepreneurs from reaching scale.By providing unique capacity building to these businesses, Village Capital and Gearbox hope to arm participating entrepreneurs focused on hardware solutions, with the needed knowledge to scale their businesses so as to enable better integration and access to such solutions that will nip energy and agricultural problems in the bud.

The program is structured around three 4-day workshops featuring sessions led by leading entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts, and the Village Capital teams. Workshops are designed to harness the power of peer support, providing entrepreneurs with a platform to assess one another, provide feedback, support, connections, and otherwise collaborate with peer and experts. In between each in-person session, teams continue to collaborate remotely. Participating entrepreneurs will receive feedbacks from peers, potential customers and experts during the programme. There lies an opportunity for two participating ventures to be peer-selected for the chance to receive $50,000 in pre-committed investments each.

With a bit of a biased focus on inventions that improve access to energy and increase agricultural productivity for small-holder farmers, the organizers are especially interested in innovations that can ensure the following:

Affordability: inventions that radically increase affordability of energy generation or agricultural products.

Reduced Consumption: innovations that reduce the cost of consumption for small-holder farmers

Efficiency: technologies that increase the efficiency of energy and/or agricultural distribution systems.

Application is totally free and no program fee for chosen enterprises. More so, the fund doesn’t take equity upfront for participation. Apply here

Application Deadline

September 7, 2015

Workshop Dates:

Workshops to be held in Nairobi, Kenya.

Workshop 1: October 21-24

Workshop 2: January 6-9

Workshop 3: February 22-25.