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The African Climate Innovation Challenge (ACIC) has announced the five winners of its 2025 competition, marking a significant step toward closing the climate financing gap on the continent and bolstering Africa’s standing as a hub for youth-led innovation.
The competition, designed to empower young African changemakers addressing the climate crisis through entrepreneurship, provides the winning startups with financial backing, a tailored business incubation curriculum, and peer-to-peer mentorship to accelerate their solutions.
The winners were selected by an independent jury at a pitch event held yesterday in Kampala, Uganda, culminating a year-long process of application calls and training for the 2025 cohort.
Finalists hailed from nine countries, including Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, and Kenya, showcasing the diversity of solutions being developed across the continent.
The winning solutions address critical climate challenges ranging from food waste to plastic pollution:
Jafife (Morocco): Deploys smart solar dryers to significantly extend the shelf life of crops, reduce post-harvest losses and methane emissions and strengthen rural climate resilience.
Helton Traders Limited (Uganda): A female-led social enterprise that converts post-consumer PET plastic waste into affordable, high-quality polyester sewing threads, driving sustainable, closed-loop manufacturing in East Africa.
Rôbalôtô (Togo): Establishes a circular waste system in schools, using smart bins and educational clubs to recycle plastic into solar bags, preventing toxic burning and lowering emissions.
Zuripacks (Kenya): Produces sustainable, plastic-free packaging alternatives designed to cut upstream carbon emissions and mitigate downstream pollution risks in climate-vulnerable urban areas.
Trashcoin (Nigeria): Gamifies recycling by rewarding users with digital tokens for collected plastic waste, diverting over 2.5 million kilograms of plastic, and creating green jobs in the process.
The ACIC highlights the need to drastically increase investment in the region, noting that while Africa accounts for one-fifth of the global population, it currently attracts only 3% of global energy investment—a figure that needs to double by 2030.
By supporting these ventures, the ACIC aims to nurture a generation of leaders capable of making a lasting environmental and social impact.
