ASIF Ignite Africa Cohort 1 for Climate Adaptation and AI-Driven Startups

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Applications are open for ASIF Ignite Africa Cohort 1. Ignite Africa Cohort 1 focuses on food and agriculture value chains, everything involved in growing, moving, storing, processing, and selling food, and the climate pressures affecting each step. They are looking for founders building tools and solutions that help farmers and agribusinesses prepare for, withstand, and recover from these climate-related shocks.

Ignite Africa is an 8-week cohort-based program for founders with a prototype who need to put it in front of real users and come out the other side with credible proof points.

Founders building climate adaptation or resilience solutions for vulnerable communities, who have built something concrete (an app, device, data model, service protocol) but haven’t yet tested it with real intended users.

They aim for cohorts with at least 40% women in leadership positions (ideally women-led or women co-led), and split roughly 50/50 between AI-first companies (where the model is the product) and AI-embedded companies (where AI sharpens an otherwise traditional solution). You don’t need deep AI experience to apply, just curiosity and willingness to learn and use AI tools during the cohort.

ASIF Ignite Africa Focus Areas

Inputs and knowledge: Getting the right resources and information to the farm
- Climate-resilient seeds and planting material
- Resilient equipment, machinery, greenhouses and irrigation
- Access to inputs: leasing, financing, logistics, supply chains
- Insurance and credit for farmers, such as weather-index insurance and microcredit
- Climate and farming advice: forecasts, early warning, agronomy
- Clean energy for farms: solar power and energy efficiency
Growing the crop: Producing more, with less, under stress
- Water-smart growing: aquaponics and hydroponics
- Solar-powered irrigation
- Farm-management software and controlled-environment farming
- Remote sensing, drones, sensors and automation
Protecting land and water: Keeping the natural base productive
- Sustainable fishing and fishery management
- Agroforestry and land restoration
- Regenerative agriculture and soil health
After the harvest: Stopping losses and reaching the market
- Cold storage and refrigeration
- Warehousing and aggregation, or agri-hubs
- Market-access and trading platforms
Processing and selling: Adding value close to the farm
- Low-energy processing, such as solar milling
- Distribution and market-access solutions

ASIF Ignite Africa Benefits

What you’ll get

Weekly group workshops on AI methods and application, customer discovery, lean experimentation and impact measurement
1:1 office hours with specialists in AI, product and sector
Subscriptions to select tools during the program
Playbooks for testing in low-income, climate-vulnerable markets
In-depth feedback on your onward journey from industry experts and investors

What you leave with

A refined, AI-enabled business model, evidence of impact and demand from real users, and a credible pitch to external stakeholders. Strong graduates are flagged for future Propel cohorts but Ignite doesn’t auto-progress companies.

Cohort size and format

13-14 founders per cohort. Fully remote. 2 workshop sessions per week, plus asynchronous work between sessions. Content-based workshops can be recorded to support asynchronous participation for founders managing caregiving or business demands.

Eligibility Criteria

They are looking for ventures at the prototype and pre-validation stage. Applicants should have a functional prototype of a product, service, or technology that has moved beyond the idea stage and is ready to be tested with real users in real-world conditions.

Solutions may have been demonstrated in controlled or lab settings, but real-world field testing with target users has not yet taken place. To make it concrete, here are the kinds of teams they expect to see. The details are illustrative.

You are a good fit if:

You’ve built a solar-powered cold room and set one up at a local market. Now you want to test whether traders will pay to store produce in it, and measure how much spoilage it prevents.
You’ve built an app that turns local weather and soil data into planting advice in a farmer’s own language. It works in demos. You haven’t yet put it in farmers’ hands across a full season.
You’ve developed a way to judge a smallholder’s creditworthiness from satellite and mobile-money data, so they can finance inputs without a credit history. The model runs, but it hasn’t been tested with a real lender and real farmers yet.

What won’t fit Ignite Africa Cohort 1

Solutions with no clear link to climate adaptation, including ideas that only cut emissions but don’t help anyone cope with climate impacts
Pure yield or profit boosters with no resilience benefit for climate-vulnerable
farmers or communities
Processing or trading businesses with no clear benefit reaching smallholder farmers
Solutions outside food and agriculture. Other focus areas open in later cohorts. Tell us you’re interested and we’ll let you know when your window opens.
Processing and sales solutions that do not clearly help smallholder farmers adapt, for example, those that improve efficiency alone without cutting losses or capturing more value for farmers.

Ignite Journey

MONTHS 1-3: Cohort selection
- Active call window, application reviews, selection.
MONTHS 4-5: Onboarding & Workshops
- Group sessions, 1:1 office hours, AI tools, building.
MONTHS 5-6: Close & Graduation
- Evidence building, positioning, showcase & feedback forum.