Opportunities Innovate UK's Global Alliance Africa: Market Readiness Support

Innovate UK's Global Alliance Africa: Market Readiness Support

As a previous Global Alliance Africa programme winner, successful applicants will receive tailored support to further develop their innovative ideas.
Registration Details
09/09/2025 28/09/2025 23:59
Opportunity Type
Business growth, Other, Training and resources
Award
A 5-month package of commercial and technical support to enable growth and scaling of innovations developed through Global Alliance Africa programmes. Support includes innovation commercialisation, market access, and pathways to secondary funding and investment. Please note, no direct funding is included in this particular intervention, but we can support you to secure additional funding/investment if required.
Organisation
Innovate UK
Sector
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Market Readiness Support

The Market Readiness Support (MRS) programme is an intervention that extends Global Alliance Africa support to scale-up and enable commercialisation progress of high-potential partnerships and innovative companies suitable for follow-on support that were previous winners of various programme interventions.

Market Readiness Support will provide a 5-month package of commercial and technical support to enable growth and scaling of innovations developed through Global Alliance Africa programmes.

By catalysing market readiness of Global Alliance Africa funded partnerships and businesses, MRS will support technological leapfrogging in Africa, an attractive market with strong GDP growth forecasts for innovative businesses, and/or UK domestic growth and scaling.

MRS will directly support high-growth companies in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, and expansion of UK companies domestically and/or to African markets, by delivering targeted support across four areas of:

  1. technical sector expertise, (such as access to international and cross-sector technical experts, knowledge exchange workshops)
  2. innovation commercialisation, (such as business plan support, IP guidance)
  3. market access, including geographical expansion and strategic partnerships (market introductions, customer testing and validation)
  4. access to secondary funding and investment via relevant pathways.

Please note this is not an application for direct funding support.

Eligibility requirements

  1. Your company / idea must have previously won support from Innovate UK Global Alliance Africa. Eligible programmes include Open Innovation programmes, Lead Customer programmes, Scaling Out For Impact, pilot projects, Sebenzisa Tembisa, or NextGen programmes.
  2. You have an intention to scale and commercialise a specific innovation or technology that your company has developed.
  3. If you previously received support in a consortium, you are not required to partner with them again; however, you must have the rights to deploy or scale the solution developed.

If you are interested in applying for this support here, please click the link below and fill in the required information. You can upload all your supporting documents to the link provided in the form.

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Get in touch

For more information, assistance with your application or to discuss accessibility needs, please contact Alana Kruger on alana.kruger@iukbc.org.uk or Babar Javed on babar.javed@iukbc.org.uk.

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Programme

This opportunity is part of Global Alliance Africa.

This FCDO funded project aims to build stronger equitable UK-African partnerships to maximise the creation of inclusive market access, funding and investment opportunities, and collaborative innovation between the UK, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya.

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