The GSMA Innovation Fund for Impactful AI (Grant between GBP 100,000 and GBP 250,000)

Deadline:19th March 2025

The GSMA Innovation Fund for Impactful AI will provide grants and venture building support to small and growing enterprises that leverage AI and other emerging technologies, in conjunction with mobile technology, to have a positive impact on the lives of people in LMICs. The fund is interested in solutions that demonstrate the transformative impact of innovative AI and supporting emerging technologies to tackle socio-economic and climate-related challenges.

Focus of Fund

• Digital solutions that leverage contextual data generated by emerging technologies for training and deploying AI-driven products and services
• Digital solutions that leverage predictive and generative AI innovations and show promise to scale and deliver positive socio-economic and/or climate-related impacts
• Digital innovations across the value chain, including:
  1. AI-driven innovations that directly reach low-income and vulnerable populations and aim to advance socio-economic development and climate action (e.g. HealthTech, AgriTech, ClimateTech, FinTech, EdTech)
  2. AI-driven deep-tech, ecosystem-level innovations [e.g. multimodal large language models (LLMs), edge computing, machine learning, big data] that support local and regional ecosystems for last-mile innovators to deploy AI solutions

Grant 

The Fund support package includes:

Grant funding: • The amount requested can be any amount between GBP 100,000 and GBP 250,000 for a grant that lasts between 15 and 18 months. Applicants are expected to justify the submitted budget amount.

Eligibility

• Leverage digital technology, especially mobile, to deliver solutions – Be able to demonstrate how AI and other emerging technologies (e.g. mobile big data, IoT, remote sensing, computer vision, blockchain, drones), in conjunction with mobile technology, will be leveraged to deliver the solution described.
• Entity type
  — Be a for-profit private sector small and growing enterprise in a low- or middle-income country.
  — Have active users and commercial revenue (users and revenue from any products or services) in at least one eligible country.
  — Be an existing entity registered and operating in the country of project implementation at the time of application (whether domestic or foreign-owned or a joint venture). In cases where responsibility for service delivery lies with a downstream partner (see section 4) rather than with the applicant (e.g. service delivery by a local government), it may be acceptable for the applicant to be registered in acountry other than that of project implementation (see geographic restrictions in section 3.3).
• Geography
  — Propose a project that is implemented in a country/countries that is/are eligible to receive official development assistance [as per the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) classification] in the following regions: Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
• Current market presence
  Have an existing entity registered and operating in the country (or countries) of project implementation.
• Ability to receive grant funds
  — Have a bank account capable of receiving GBP payments, as all disbursements from the GSMA will be made in GBP. As a general rule, the applicant should be registered in and maintain a bank account in the country where the project will be implemented. On an exceptional basis, subject to the GSMA’s assessment of the particular case, the GSMA could send funds to the GBP account of a parent company registered in a country other than the project implementation country.