Royal Academy of Engineering supports ambitious African innovators and develops the engineering and innovation capacity of individuals, organisations and systems in Africa through the Global Challenges Research Fund.

Africa Catalyst

Africa Catalyst aims to strengthen professional engineering bodies in sub-Saharan Africa so that they can effectively promote the profession, share best practice and increase local engineering capacity, to help drive development. 

This is supported by high-quality research focusing on expanding the evidence base for the importance of robust engineering institutions and the role they play in delivering sustainable growth, and mapping engineering capacity and diversity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Phase 3 of GCRF Africa Catalyst aims to galvanise, build on and scale up previously successful activities. As with previous rounds of the programme, this round will aim to promote close collaboration between organisations in sub-Saharan Africa and the UK.

Africa Prize 

The Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, founded by the Royal Academy of Engineering, is Africa’s biggest prize dedicated to engineering innovation. It awards crucial commercialisation support to ambitious African innovators developing scalable engineering solutions to local challenges, demonstrating the importance of engineering as an enabler of improved quality of life and economic development.

An eight-month period of tailored training and mentoring culminates in a showcase event where a winner is selected to receive £25,000 along with three runners-up, who are each awarded £10,000.

Frontiers of Development

Frontiers of Development is a series of symposia bringing together the best early- to mid-career researchers and practitioners (5-20 years post-doc or industry equivalent) from industry, academia, government and NGOs in multidisciplinary workshops to address fundamental development challenges. 

The programme is run by the Royal Academy of Engineering, but all four of the UK’s national academies (The Royal Academy of Engineering, The Academy of Medical Sciences, The British Academy and The Royal Society) contribute their expertise to devise themes for the events collaboratively.

Frontiers Follow-on Grants 

The Frontiers Follow-On Funding scheme aims to build on, and scale up, successes from the UK National Academies’ early- and mid-career research programmes funded by the GCRF. The scheme aims to support collaborative research that tackles international development challenges and enables previously seeded projects to be developed into fully functioning collaborative research projects.

Higher Education Partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa Programme

The Higher Education Partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa Programme (HEP SSA) is run by Royal Academy of Engineering and supported by the Anglo American Group Foundation and the Global Challenges Research Fund.

By forming and strengthening relationships between academia and industry, the programme aims to ensure that the higher education system in sub-Saharan Africa produces engineers with the skills and knowledge required to meet the needs of industry, tackle local challenges, address the engineering skills shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, and to showcase engineering’s role in driving economic development in the region.