The Data Driven Innovation (DDI) Incubation Centre is a newly established Incubation Centre in the Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) Region. The Centre is hosted by the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NMCall for Incubatee Application Form-AIST) based in Arusha Tanzania through the African Centre for Research, Agricultural Advancement, Teaching Excellence and Sustainability (CREATES) which is based at NM-AIST. The DDI Incubation Centre is one of the four Regional Incubators started and supported by the Inter Universities Council for East Africa (IUCEA) with grants from the World Bank. The Incubation Centre focuses on 4 main thematic areas; Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Security, Biodiversity and the Environment, and Health with ICT and entrepreneurship being the backbone drivers of these areas. The centre is aimed at testing products in real life environments as it is working with commercially viable entities to launch companies and products into the national, regional and international market.
The DDI Incubator intends to offer young innovators/inventors (henceforth referred to as innovators) and entrepreneurs a wide range of business development services including but not limited to; business idea analysis and diagnostics, mentorship, product/prototypes development and registration services, work station provisions, specialised trainings, market access, pitching and networking activities, among others. Generally the Centre promotes innovators and entrepreneurs offering potential ideas, prototypes and products facilities and equipment access at NM-AIST including its Param-Kilimanjaro -High-Performance Computing (HPC) facility with a robust ICT Platform – A Data Hub – that host a vast amount of authenticated Data on different attributes of farming: farm and farmers – including soil, plant, water, animals, extension services, land use and off-takers and suppliers.
Call for Expression of Interest
NM-AIST hereby invites expressions of interest from potential young innovators from the SSA Region who have ideas, prototypes or products to apply for participating in the DDI incubation programme. The application process is divided into three steps; the first step is registration by filling in the application form which can be accessed at the NM-AIST website www.nm-ast.ac.tz and CREATES website www.creates-nm-aist.ac.tz .
