Programs

Funding the people doing the work.

Three programs, designed to back the unsexy parts of research that nobody else funds: the data work, the field validation, the reproduction script, the slow consent process. Open-call, openly evaluated, and openly licensed.

Fellowship

Research Fellowship

12 months · Cohort of 8–12

A fully-funded, twelve-month position for early-career African researchers. Fellows join one of our four pillars (Languages, Agriculture, Health, Climate), are paired with a senior mentor, and ship one openly-licensed output — a paper, dataset, or model release — co-designed in the first month.

→Monthly stipend benchmarked to local cost of living, published transparently
→4,000 A100-equivalent GPU-hours, expandable on request
→Weekly 1:1 with a senior mentor; fortnightly cohort review
→$4,000 conference and publication budget
→Health insurance + $1,200 yearly research allowance
→First-author credit on whatever you ship

Download the 2026 fellowship brochure

Residency

Clinical & Field Residency

6 months · 4–6 residents per year

For practitioners — clinicians, agronomists, extension workers, language teachers — embedded with a research pod to co-design tools that get used in the field. Residents bring the domain; the pod brings the engineering. Both share authorship and decision-making.

→Embedded with a working research pod from week one
→Field deployment budget of up to $8,000
→Joint authorship on all outputs
→Travel and accommodation covered for the residency period
→Honorarium that does not require leaving your primary post

Apply or ask a question

Grant

Open Science Microgrants

Rolling · $2k–$15k

Small, fast grants for releasing datasets, model weights, evaluations, and tooling under open licenses. No equity. No IP claim. A four-week turnaround from application to decision. We will fund the unsexy work — the dataset card, the eval harness, the reproduction script — that nobody else funds.

→$2,000–$15,000 per grant
→Four-week decision turnaround
→No equity, no IP claim, no exclusivity
→We pay invoices, not promises — milestone-based disbursement
→Suitable for individuals, small teams, or community organisations

Apply or ask a question

How we choose projects.

Local relevance

The problem is named and prioritised by the community it affects. We will ask you who you talked to before scoping. If the answer is 'nobody', that is the work to do first.

Open by default

Code, data, and weights are releasable under permissive licenses. Exceptions need a written ethical justification on file.

Honest scope

We prefer small, finishable work over ambitious work that never ships. A focused twelve-month deliverable beats a sprawling roadmap every time.

Replicable

If we can't re-run your training in a notebook six months from now, it didn't happen. Reproducibility is part of the deliverable, not a bonus.

Frequently asked.

Do I need a PhD to apply for the fellowship?

No. We hire across disciplines and career stages. Most of our fellows are 1–5 years post-undergraduate.

Can I be based outside Africa?

Fellows must be based on the African continent for the duration of the fellowship. We make narrow exceptions for the diaspora returning to a hub; ask us.

Can I bring my own funding?

Yes. We host visiting researchers with their own grants and provide compute, mentorship, and operational support at cost.

What happens to the IP I create?

Nothing surprising. Outputs are released openly under the licenses described on each program page. You retain authorship credit. We take no equity and claim no IP.