
Following the developments of COVID-19 in Africa, the MEST Africa Challenge has announced that this year’s competition will be entirely virtual for the first time. In light of this uncertain time, MEST is expanding the 2020 MEST Africa Challenge to target even more tech startups in need of funding. The application deadline has been extended to May 13th.

Global - Call for Code asks Innovators to create practical, effective and high quality based on one or more IBM cloud services to build solutions to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 and climate change. A prize of $200,000 for the winner, $25000 USD for the first runner up and $10,000 for the third and fourth runner up.

IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), aims to support startups trying to create technology solutions aligned with Circuits and Systems Society goals to help in the COVID-19 pandemic. The winning teams will be invited to join ISCAS 2020 in Seville (11-14 October 2020) and will win grants of up to US$ 10000.

With a prize fund of US$600,000, per category, the Zayed Sustainability Prize celebrates innovative achievements that are impacting lives across five categories: Health, Food, Energy, Water and Global High Schools. African innovators, SMEs, entrepreneurs, NGOs and NPOs are eligible to apply. Entries close 11th June 2020.

The centre stage of the SA Innovation Summit, the Africa Cup is a competition providing start-ups and early-stage companies in all tech-enabled sectors from around the world to compete for investment, showcase their products and services, gain market and media exposure, and secure support in the stages of scaling and growth.

Kenya and Uganda - Vital Capital has launched a new emergency debt facility providing loans to companies to help them get through the COVID-19 pandemic while continuing to offer essential services. This is available in Kenya and Uganda, and will subsequently expand into Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Angola and Senegal.

Bridge for Billions has developed a proprietary gamified incubation platform with all the elements of the offline incubation moved online. At Bridge, their response to this COVID-19 crisis has been to gather different actors of the ecosystem (incubators & accelerators, universities), and offer them to move their ongoing business training/ entrepreneurship programs to our online incubation platform, *for free* for the next 3 months (April, May & June). This way your entrepreneurs can still work on their businesses from home and you can manage the entire process!

The 2020 edition of the ITU Innovation Challenges will be taking place amid a global pandemic caused by Covid-19. This has resulted in stress on value chains and countries’ readiness for a digital economy, significantly affecting social conditions worldwide. The challenge is a global open competition platform for innovators and ecosystem builders to present their ideas and projects, empowering them to transform their communities into thriving digital societies.