South African Inter-City Innovation Challenge 2025

Deadline: August 15, 2025

Got a smart solution for townships or service delivery? Submit your idea for the Inaugural SA Intercity Innovation Challenge 2025.

In the lead-up to South Africa’s hosting of the G20 Summit, cities across the country are uniting to demonstrate how local and inclusive innovation can solve pressing service delivery challenges, offering models of resilience, and ingenuity that can be shared with the African continent and the rest of the world.

The South African Intercity Innovation Challenge 2025 is a collaboration between the metropolitan municipalities, leading incubators in South African championed by the South African Local Government Association.

This national initiative aim is to chiefly surface community-powered, tech-enabled solutions that promote inclusive development and foster innovation, improve public service delivery and management decision making, and hamess local potential in line with the values and goal of the G20, Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP) 2030, and the Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF). Additionally, the South African Intercity Innovation Challenge 2025 intends to exemplify that communities, when empowered and afforded the opportunity, can lead innovation from the front and offer scalable solutions to today’s most urgent urban problems and management decision-making challenges at local government.

Themes

Participants are invited to submit proposals under one of the two challenge themes below.
- Challenge Theme 1: Township Tech Transformation
  - Townships and informal settlements across South Africa face complex challenges such as limited infrastructure, unemployment; service delivery backlogs; and constrained digital access. Yet, these communities are also home to immense creativity, entrepreneurship, and local resilience.
  - Despite the limited resources, residents continue to innovate and adapt, often developing unique solutions to navigate the service delivery and related challenges whilst improving the quality of decision making in municipalities.
  - The Challenge 1 of the South African Inter City Innovation Challenge, under the theme Township tech transformation, pursues the following:
    - To unlock the under-leveraged innovation ecosystem by supporting low-cost, high-impact solutions that use technology to improve quality of life, generate income, or expand access to essential services in townships and informal areas.
    - To accelerate inclusion, catalyze township economies, amplify community-driven ideas, and promote grassroots digital transformation.
  - Challenge Statement
    - What are the alternative low-cost, high-impact innovations that can unlock economic potential and improve quality of life in informal settlements and townships?
    - Challenge 1 calls for innovators to propose novel technology-enabled solutions, be it digital tools, platforms, or infrastructure, that responds to community needs and demonstrate grassroots empowerment.
- Challenge Theme 2: Intelligent Service Delivery
  - South African cities must constantly improve the delivery of essential services, such as water management, electricity, licensing, waste collection, and public safety, in the face of growing urban populations, resource constraints, and rising citizen expectations.
  - Too often, service delivery is reactive, inefficient, or disconnected from community needs. New digital technologies offer an opportunity to reinvent service delivery. Tools like Artificial Intelligence (Al), the Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced data analytics can help cities move from manual, reactive systems to proactive, citizen-centric models. Intelligent service delivery means using real-time data, predictive maintenance, user feedback, and automation to provide services more efficiently, transparently, and sustainably.
  - Challenge Statement
    - How can Cities deploy smart technologies such as Al, IoT, and data-driven platforms to transform service delivery in cities and accelerate service delivery decision making?
    - Challenge 2 seeks for bold, creative, novel solutions that make basic service delivery more predictive, transparent, and user-friendly, while improving quality and efficiency at scale and management decision making.

Award Information

Winners of Challenge 1 and Challenge 2 will be announced at the South African Intercity Innovation Awards Ceremony taking place in November 2025 and will be awarded funding for their projects, as well as receive incubation services with technical and business mentors, intellectual property specialists, and access to the leading South African incubators’ network (The Innovation Hub, Innovate Durban, Tshimologong), industry, and government partners. subject to confirmation by incubators. Furthermore, the selected proposals may be;
- Showcased at national innovation events and international platforms (including the G20).
- Supported for piloting or scaling with partner cities.