AfOx Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship Scheme 2025 for African Innovators

Reach us on

Applications are now open for the 2025 AfOx Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship Scheme. AfOx-HIP is open to work with any type of technology and in any discipline, including outside life sciences and engineering sciences, to create solutions for disease prevention, diagnosis, management and treatment. This includes vaccines, diagnostics, medical devices, therapeutics and surgical devices.

Solutions with high impact potential that offer opportunities for transformative health delivery in Africa will be prioritised. We especially encourage solutions aimed at:

Preventing, diagnosing or treating zoonotic diseases
Reducing premature deaths from non-communicable diseases amongst African populations
Optimising diagnostic and prognostic tests for African contexts
Novel diagnostic tools to increase resilience to endemic diseases

Program Details

Virtual programme in innovation & entrepreneurship in health

In each cohort, up to 50 successful applicants benefit from a relevant and robust teaching course on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Health for Africa. The training including systems thinking, making financial projections, writing and delivering a pitch, and navigating intellectual property and regulatory hurdles.
The training is delivered through a series of web-based sessions over 16 weeks. The self-paced interactive programme and weekly workshops requires 8–10 hours/week in total. The programme is designed for optimal accessibility and ease of use for busy innovator-entrepreneurs.
Personalised mentorship and support is provided to help fellows develop their ventures.
The programme integrates the use of virtual workrooms for small group engagement and co-creation, so the whole cohort of African innovators learns together, creating an interactive network of peers.

AfOx Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship Scheme Benefits

During this second phase of training, the cohort is also invited to a week-long boot camp in Oxford. The boot camp offers them an opportunity to participate in hands-on workshops and engage with their peers from their cohort and at Oxford.
The boot camp covers essential topics for deep science start-ups including intellectual property rights, regulatory considerations, business valuation, fundraising strategies, negotiating deals, building the team and how to run an effective board. It is an invaluable opportunity for the cohort to stress test their projects and integrate critical technical and business strategy feedback.
The week concludes with a Demo Day during which participants present their start-ups to the wider AfOx networks for investment or other offers of support.
In Summer 2023, 25 innovators were invited to the event held at Saïd Business School and Keble College.

Eligibility Requirements

The applicant must be:

A national of an African country or have indefinite leave to remain in an African country
Domiciled in an African country in which they must be a legal resident and
Developing the proposed health innovation in their host country

All applicants to cohort 5 will be notified of the outcome of their application via email by the 31st of May 2025 at the latest.