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Non-profit grantmaking organisation Indigo Trust has taken over the sole management of the fund it co-founded in 2014 to support African technology hubs.

The Joint Hub Fund Programme was established in June of 2014 by Indigo Trust, the DOEN Foundation and Hivos, aimed at catalysing Africa’s technology startup ecosystem in order for it to contribute to significant social changes and create employment.

The fund has supported, among others, Cameroon’s ActivSpaces, Uganda’s HiveColab and Ghana’s iSpace with core funding, as well as the likes of Malawi’s mHub, Sierra Leone’s Sensi, Kenya’s SwahiliBox and Tanzania’s KINU.

Indigo Trust has now taken over sole management of the initiative, which is now known as ‘The Technology Innovation Hub Fund for Sub-Saharan Africa’. The fund will continue to provide core costs to relatively established hubs and seed funding to groups aiming to grow and strengthen technology communities in countries or cities where they barely exist.  

“We’ll also be exploring some programmatic interventions this year to support civic tech innovation coming out of these spaces,” Indigo Trust said.

“We believe that the best solutions to a country’s challenges are likely to be devised locally. We see an important role for technology innovation hubs in supporting local technology driven innovation.”

The organisation said through providing state-of-the-art facilities, events, mentorship, training and networking opportunities to technology communities across Sub-Saharan Africa, innovation hubs help to grow, upskill and strengthen technology communities and help them connect to important stakeholders like funders and the corporate sector.

“In the long-term, we believe this will have a catalytic effect on the quality and quantity of projects being devised across the continent,” Indigo Trust said.

Some new funders are in the pipeline for the initiative, and will be announced shortly.

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