As part of Sahara Foundation’s effort towards actualizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), we recently launched the Sahara Impact Fund (SIF) and Governance Unusual Programme, a strategic partnership between Sahara Foundation, Ford Foundation, LEAP Africa and Impact Investors Foundation leveraging on. The initiative aims to facilitate the generation of ideas and solutions towards increasing access to clean energy, creating sustainable environment and mobilizing partnerships to promote the SDGs while inspiring a good governance paradigm shift.

The Sahara Impact Fund goes beyond simply giving money to social innovators, but rather targets seismic shifts driven by supporting innovation through empowering social entrepreneurs and change makers. The SIF is focused on making substantial, long-lasting impact across the African continent whilst simultaneously encouraging a mindset orientation supportive of good governance.

Sahara Foundation will drive the programme using the Sahara extrapreneurship model with an underlying ethos of “creating enabling environment for entrepreneurs”. The fund’s capacity is set at over $100,000 with opportunity for incremental access by beneficiaries based on impact, reach and sustainability matrices targeted at supporting young social entrepreneurs in Africa with seed funding as well as providing access to mentoring from Sahara Group and other private sector partners, to scale up clean energy and sustainable environment innovations.