The K4GGWA Innovation Facility

The K4GGWA Innovation Facility starts from a vision. A vision of Sahelian youth innovating their way to prosperity and a regreened landscape.

Across the Great Green wall, there are many thousands of young, innovative and entrepreneurial people who struggle to get started. They are bright, creative and dynamic, but lack capital, or business skills, or peer support, or access to basic services.

They are the ones the Innovation Facility seeks to help. We look for and select the most promising initiatives we can find. We support their growth and development. We give them a hand using a variety of tools – small grants, mentorship, internships, introducing them to prominent individuals – whatever they need.

What kind of initiatives do we focus on? Almost any, as long as they tackle the broader biophysical, sociopolitical or gender challenges common across the Great Green Wall. We’re looking for practices, approaches, technologies, business models and innovative institutional arrangements – anything that shows promise in accelerating the broader Great Green Wall objectives. Because our primary focus is on scalability, we always seek to overcome the “not invented here” syndrome, by identifying and encouraging the spread of innovative approaches across the GGW area, irrespective of their origin.