Deadline Date: May 31, 2026
The UNDP FUNGUO Innovation Programme has announced its Fifth Call for Funding Applications to support youth-led, impact-driven startups and innovative MSMEs in Tanzania to scale into investment-ready enterprises.
The focus areas of this call include agricultural value chain innovation, digital innovation, and critical minerals value chain development, with an overarching objective of strengthening youth employment, gender inclusion, climate action, digital transformation, and sustainable livelihoods through scalable enterprise solutions.
This initiative by United Nations Development Programme through its FUNGUO Innovation Programme is designed to strengthen Tanzania’s innovation ecosystem by supporting early- and growth-stage businesses operating in the “missing middle” of the startup landscape. It combines catalytic innovation financing, strengthened innovation service delivery, and improvements in the enabling environment for youth- and women-led enterprises to help ventures scale and become investment-ready.
The programme targets ventures that demonstrate innovation in products, services, business models, or processes and are actively working to scale while facing challenges in accessing conventional funding. It prioritises businesses with strong potential for impact in areas such as youth employment, gender inclusion, climate action, digital transformation, and sustainable livelihoods. Within the agricultural value chain, it supports solutions that transform food systems, improve post-harvest handling, enhance market linkages, and advance climate-smart agriculture. In digital innovation, it supports tech and tech-enabled solutions including fintech, healthtech, edtech, e-commerce, productivity tools, and other digitally driven business models that solve real market problems. In the critical minerals value chain, it focuses on ventures involved in value addition, downstream processing, supply chain development, responsible sourcing, and community-linked enterprise models that enhance economic and social returns from mineral resources.
Eligible applicants must be for-profit or market-oriented social enterprises legally registered in Tanzania, majority-owned by Tanzanian citizens, and beyond the ideation and pilot stage with a minimum viable product and market traction. Ventures must not have raised more than USD 100,000 in equity or debt funding to date and must operate with a commitment to do no harm to people and the environment.
For more information, visit Funguo.
