uBoraBora was set up to fund implementers working on foundational literacy and numeracy programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Alongside our partners Laterite and with seed funding from BMGF, we are supporting open-minded implementers who are collectively frustrated with the status quo and who want to get under the hood of why and how interventions in this space work (or don’t).
Funders: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Partners: Laterite
The Hanga Sexual & Reproductive Health (SRH) Program offers technical and business support to startups in Sub-Saharan Africa who are exploring technology-enabled solutions to key issues in SRH. Brink provides money-can’t-buy support to these ventures to test their solutions and business models.
Funders: Rwanda Development Board (RDB), Rwanda ICT, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Rwanda
Partners: Three Stones International
The Frontier Tech Hub works with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) staff and global partners to understand the potential for innovative tech in the development context, and then test and scale their ideas. The Hub enables the FCDO to invest in early-stage ideas and radical technology solutions, build capacity to develop, use and govern technology responsibly and support locally led innovation.
Funders: FCDO
Partners: Results For Development, DT Global
Brink leads innovation as part of the FCDO-funded Global EdTech Hub. Our role is to make room for experimentation and to convert evidence into implementation in Kenya, Malawi, Zanzibar, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. To do this we’re pioneering innovative approaches to research, such as the ‘sandbox‘ approach, which allows for the testing of new approaches in a small number of schools to learn what works, before innovations are rolled out more widely.
Funders: FCDO, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, International Development Research Centre, World Bank
Partners: University of Cambridge, Results For Development, Jigsaw Education, OpenDevEd
The FCDO-funded Oxygen CoLab exists to address the shortage of oxygen provision in low-resource settings.
To date, across the portfolio of five grantees, more than 10,000 patients have been treated; and in 2024, for the first time ever, there will be fit-for-purpose oxygen concentrators for low-resource settings in the world.
Funders: FCDO
Partners: UNICEF
The Vaccine Data CoLab was created to make transformative strides towards a more equitable future, by strengthening data systems and enabling data-based decision-making to improve immunisation programming at the frontline.
The CoLab explored different aspects of the vaccine data system in Uganda, Nigeria and Indonesia, in order to strengthen hyperlocal systems in those countries.
Funders: FCDO
Partners: Infectious Disease Institute, Makarere University, Dev Afrique, DT Global, Vaccine Confidence Project, Data for Implementation
Enabling innovators working in conflict zones to learn from one another, build partnerships and act as a force for change within humanitarian innovation.
Funders: Grand Challenges Canada
Accelerating the flow of evidence from academia to the workplace so frontline workers can access, use, and respond to research and improve their health.
Funders: Grand Challenges Canada
Working to understand the current realities and future possibilities for the millions of entrepreneurial Kenyans who hustle to sustain livelihoods across the informal economy.
Funders: TRANSFORM
Partners: Laterite, Procol Kenya, Ideas Unplugged, Busara
Leading strategy, design and delivery of a 3-year transition of 11 African cities to become smart, digitally-enabled cities who grow together.
Funders: AFD Agence Française de Développement
Partners: ANRU Agence Nationale pour la Rénovation Urbaine
Creating a learning experience for GIZ teams to learn strategic foresight and develop a future vision to apply to their work across agriculture & food, resources & circularity, energy & mobility.
Funders: GIZ
Bringing our ventures and experimentation expertise to our work with the 100x startups in the accelerator on real-world tests for their propositions and scaling pathways.
Funders: LSE, Marshall Institute
Co-creating a framework for the adoption of innovation in international development organisations through research, collaboration with the OECD's Development Assistance Committee members and contributing to a working paper on institutionalising new ways of working,
Funders: OECD
Making the Invisible Visible: Imagining a Better Future for Kenya's significant repair and reuse economy.
Funders: FCDO
Partners: Shujaaz, Busara, Incubator Nest, Ideas Unplugged
A horizon scan of emerging methods for supporting and managing innovation, including interviews with 50+ world leading innovators.
Partners: Nesta
Designing a series of conversations with the UK's retail sector to activate the RSA's report on the four futures of work and co-create next steps for industry.
Partners: RSA
Target portfolio strategy and design, and grantee storytelling in this multi-country FCDO-funded programme that aims to support research and innovation systems strengthening in Africa.
Funders: FCDO
Portfolio strategy, fund design and grantee support to enable frontier technology solutions to reach people with disabilities in Africa, and to test business models that are most likely to succeed.
Funders: FCDO
Partners: AT2030, Global Disability Innovation Hub, Catalyst Fund
Working with the senior team at Oxfam America to shape strategy, plan and design their portfolio with the aim to improve how the organisation fights poverty, inequality and injustice across the world.
Funders: Oxfam
Building capabilities across a UK government Department (DFID) to manage adaptive development programmes better. We drew on approaches from the development and tech sector including adaptive management, agile ways of working and lean start-up and worked to realign incentives across procurement and HR practices.
Funders: FCDO
Partners: ODI
Supporting a portfolio of EdTech innovations in Rwanda with Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning on this ‘education marketplace’ for innovations, which was piloted in Rwanda 2022-2023.
Funders: Hempel, Rwandan Government
Partners: Three Stones International
