Category Archives: business funding

TONY ELUMELU FOUNDATION ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAMME

Application Deadline: 31 March, 2024

LOCATION: Nigeria

The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), Africa’s leading philanthropy dedicated to empowering African entrepreneurs, opens applications on its TEFConnect digital platform (www.tefconnect.com) on January 1, 2024. The Foundation’s flagship initiative, the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme, is a 10-year, $100 million commitment to identify, train mentor and fund 10,000 entrepreneurs, capable of changing the face of business across Africa.

ELIGIBILITY:

Open to Africans from all 54 African countries with scalable business ideas or a business that has been operational for no more than 5 years.

Applicants must be 18 years of age and above or considered above the age of minors in their country.

The programme is not open to research institutions, faith based organisations, value adding trading companies, government contractors and businesses not located in Africa.

All businesses must be business ideas or an early stage company, in the range of 0 to 5 years old.

Your application must focus on ONE business only. We advise choosing your best, most feasible/innovative business idea. Selected entrepreneurs are not permitted to apply for future cohorts of the programme, even with a different business or business idea.

Current employees or their family members from the Tony Elumelu Foundation and affiliate companies in the Heirs Holdings Group and UBA Group are not eligible to apply for the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme, either individually or as part of a team.

All shortlisted participants are required to open business accounts in your registered business name. They DO NOT pay seed capital into individual or corporate accounts.

The final selected beneficiaries who are from the countries where UBA is present will open business accounts in any UBA branch located in the country WHILE the beneficiaries from countries where UBA is not present will open business accounts with reputable commercial banks recommended by TEF.

BENEFIT:

The funds will be wired directly into the entrepreneur’s business bank account – personal accounts are not permissible.  For those in UBA countries, the business account must be opened with UBA.

The initial seed capital funding is fixed at $5,000.

Seed capital is disbursed to entrepreneurs who have received the training and mentorship and meet certain participatory guidelines and objectives. Register on TEFConnect for more information, www.tefconnect.net

APPLY

OPEN AI SUPERALIGNMENT FAST GRANTS

Application Deadline: February 18, 2024

LOCATION: USA

OpenAI is launching $10M in grants to support technical research towards the alignment and safety of superhuman AI systems, including weak-to-strong generalization, interpretability, scalable oversight, and more

ELIGIBILITY:

Individuals and institutions in most other countries are expected to apply.

No prior experience working on alignment is required; we are actively looking to support researchers who are excited to work on alignment for the first time.

While they expect more fully-formed research projects for larger grants, they’re open to more exploratory smaller grants, e.g. for a graduate student who wants to explore working on alignment and is considering a few different directions, but doesn’t have a fully-formed project yet.

Excellent machine learning researchers and engineers who haven’t worked on alignment before, but want to take a crack at some of these research directions can apply.

BENEFIT:

They are offering $100K–$2M grants for academic labs, nonprofits, and individual researchers.

For graduate students, they are sponsoring a one-year $150K OpenAI Superalignment Fellowship: $75K in stipend and $75K in compute and research funding.

APPLY