The Rockefeller Foundation and Tony Elumelu Foundation Announce Africa Winners of the Impact Economy Innovations Fund

Winners of the Africa Impact Economy Innovations Fund (IEIF) have been announced. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Tony Elumelu Foundation made the announcement in a joint statement. The IEIF, which was launched in April 2013, provides grant capital for entrepreneurs with projects that create jobs, and supports proposals geared towards enabling capital solutions and promoting impact investing industry infrastructure. The winners of the IEIF were selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants from across Africa, and represented several sectors across the continent including Finance, Agriculture, Policy & Research and Information Technology. Making the list of winning applications were Investisseurs & Partenaires (Senegal), Renew LLC (Ethiopia), M.Lab Africa (Kenya), Policy and  Economic Research Council (Tanzania), Doreo Partners (Nigeria),  GIMPA Centre for Impact Investing (Ghana)  and SliceBiz  (Ghana). The winners expressed their commitment to providing support services to their stakeholders with the additional supporting resources at their disposal as a result of the grant. “The IEIF grant will assist us to augment our portfolio of services with improved interventions for social enterprises and enable us increase the potential for success for start-ups that go through our incubation program.” said John Kieti of M.Lab, the grant winner from Kenya. “Thanks to this funding, we can now focus on our core mission of creating alternative finance pathways for the next generation of African Start-ups through a micro-investment platform. This funding is by far our most remarkable opportunity to date and we intend to fully leverage the advantages to deliver some key outcomes for the Ghanaian and African start-up ecosystem,” added William Senyo the CEO of SliceBiz, one of the winners from Ghana.