Supporting STISA 2034: SGCI Multilateral Research Call 2026 — CAD $50,000 to CAD $300,000 per Consortium Member for Multi-Country African Research, Expressions of Interest Closing 25 September 2026

Supporting STISA 2034: SGCI Multilateral Research Call 2026 — CAD $50,000 to CAD $300,000 per Consortium Member for Multi-Country African Research, Expressions of Interest Closing 25 September 2026

The Science Granting Councils Initiative in sub-Saharan Africa launched this call on 3 July 2026, and expressions of interest close at 23:59 EDT on Friday, 25 September 2026. It is one of the larger coordinated research competitions on the continent this cycle: nineteen national science granting councils are putting money on the table jointly, alongside the Government of Norway, the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Wellcome, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre, which manages the call on the funders’ behalf.

The structural feature that defines this call — and the one most likely to sink an otherwise strong team — is that you cannot apply alone. Every application must come from a consortium of institutions in at least three different participating countries, and each of those institutions must be independently capable of receiving and administering a grant from its own national council. This is not a call where one strong university writes a proposal and lists partners as collaborators. It is a call where three to six institutions each take on real money and real accountability.

Key Details

What the Call Actually Funds

The call operationalizes the African Union’s Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2034 (STISA-2034), the continental framework that positions science and innovation as central to Africa’s response to climate change, pandemics, food insecurity, energy access and economic shocks. SGCI itself is a continental platform of twenty national science granting councils, launched in 2015 and now in its third phase.

Five thematic streams are open, matching STISA-2034’s priority sectors. Each has named research avenues, and the call is explicit that a proposal failing to demonstrate clear alignment with a thematic priority will be eliminated immediately at screening rather than scored down.

Health covers three avenues: new models for resilient health systems with an emphasis on primary care, trauma and emergency services, and health financing innovation; One Health preparedness and infectious disease surveillance, including AI-driven surveillance and predictive modelling for zoonotic and climate-linked threats; and the use of traditional knowledge against communicable and non-communicable diseases, including pharmacopoeia harmonization and biodiversity-based bioprospecting.

Agriculture has two avenues: climate-resilient and agroecological production systems, including soil, livestock and water management innovation; and inclusive precision agriculture, post-harvest systems and value addition supporting small-scale farmholders, covering AI, gene editing, earth observation, drones, sensors, traceability and food safety.

Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies splits into applications — AI addressing community challenges in agriculture, health, environment and education, and scaling proven AI-enabled innovations — and learning and entrepreneurship, covering STEM and AI skills models for African youth, women and researchers, plus digital entrepreneurship.

Energy runs across three avenues: diversified and optimized renewable sources including solar, wind, biomass, biogas, green hydrogen and hydropower; innovation in battery technology, storage, smart grids, clean cooking and demand-side efficiency; and local and regional manufacturing, commercialization and partnerships across energy value chains.

Environment covers water security, biodiversity and natural resource governance — including geospatial technologies, circular economy and waste-to-resource solutions from mining and extractives — alongside climate resilience and adaptation, disaster risk reduction, climate modelling and early warning systems.

A proposal may be cross-cutting, but you must clearly name one primary stream during the application.

Who This Fits

The strongest fit is an established research group at a university or public research organization that already has working relationships with peer institutions in two or more other participating countries, and that can point to prior collaborative work rather than aspirational partnership language. The assessment criteria award 25% of the score to team composition and strength, and evidence of previous collaboration between team members is explicitly named as an asset.

The nineteen participating countries are Botswana, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Critically, not every country is open to every stream. Nigeria participates only in the AI stream. Togo participates only in Agriculture. Ghana is open to Health and AI. Sierra Leone and Malawi cover Agriculture and Energy. Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe cover Agriculture, AI and Energy. Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda are open across all five. Check the country annex before you build the consortium, not after — a partner whose national council is not funding your stream cannot be a co-applicant on your project.

Institutions outside Africa can join a consortium as participants or consultants and are welcome, particularly where they are end users or key stakeholders. They cannot receive research funds from this call, directly or indirectly.

Funding Ceilings Are Set Nationally, in Local Currency

The headline CAD $50,000 to CAD $300,000 range is a band, not an entitlement. Annex 1 of the call document sets a maximum per national consortium member in local currency, and these vary widely: 1,150,000 BWP in Botswana, 50,000,000 XOF in Burkina Faso, 30,000,000 XOF in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Togo, 22,500,000 ETB in Ethiopia, 800,000 GHS in Ghana, 20,000,000 KES in Kenya, 80,000,000 MWK in Malawi, 5,000,000 MZN in Mozambique, 700,000 NAD in Namibia, 100,000,000 NGN in Nigeria, 100,000,000 RWF in Rwanda, 1,280,000 SLE in Sierra Leone, 1,500,000 ZAR in South Africa, 300,000,000 TZS in Tanzania, 500,000,000 UGX in Uganda, 1,000,000 ZMW in Zambia and 1,300,000 ZWG in Zimbabwe.

Build the consortium budget bottom-up from these ceilings. The EOI budget should be presented in the local currency of the lead applicant organization, but each member’s amount must respect that member’s own national cap.

Eligible costs include field and laboratory work, personnel costs covering salaries, benefits and replacement or research allowances, stipends and fellowships for students and postdoctoral fellows, dissemination costs such as policy briefs and article publication, and consultancies or subgrants. Travel is limited to economy class or lower. Large equipment purchases are discouraged given project scale and duration.

Country-Specific Requirements That Change the Team You Build

Several councils layer additional conditions on top of the general criteria, and some of these directly constrain who must be on your team:

• Botswana requires at least one female researcher, at least one early-career researcher aged 35 or under, and support for at least one Botswana postgraduate student. The team must be registered in the national Research Information Management System.
• Burkina Faso requires multidisciplinary teams including an end-user institution, requires lead institutions to be Burkinabé-led, and breaks ties in favour of women-led proposals.
• Kenya requires a Kenyan citizen principal investigator holding a PhD, affiliated with a recognized Kenyan institution and not on extended unpaid leave.
• Rwanda requires a Rwandan national PI, mandatory collaboration with a Rwandan private-sector or industry partner, and demonstrated job-creation potential.
• South Africa requires a citizen or permanent resident PI at a public higher education or research institution; SME, private and NGO participants may join but cannot serve as PI and are expected to cover their own costs. A historically disadvantaged institution must be part of the consortium.
• Tanzania excludes salaries, stipends, tuition fees, overheads and administrative costs from budgets entirely, and requires all participating Tanzanian researchers to be registered in NISSTI.
• Namibia, Rwanda and Burkina Faso each treat 30% representation of the less-represented gender as a requirement or a competitive asset.
• Ghana requires institutional letters of support and uses the Ghana Card as primary identification for the PI and team members.
• Zambia requires registration with the National Science and Technology Council.

Read the annex entry for every country in your consortium. A Tanzanian partner budgeting for salaries, or a South African consortium without a historically disadvantaged institution, is an avoidable eligibility failure.

What the Expression of Interest Requires

Stage 1 is deliberately short. Through the SurveyMonkey Apply portal you provide the project title, selected thematic area and research avenue, estimated duration up to 36 months, and estimated budget sought by the lead and each co-applicant.

Four narrative fields follow, each capped at 500 words:

1. Background description of the development challenge, with explicit reference to regional development outcomes and to national, sub-regional, regional and global frameworks — and a clear statement of the research’s intended end users.
2. Key research questions, justification of alignment with a thematic priority and research avenue, and a statement of relevance and novelty against the current state of knowledge and national or regional STI priorities.
3. Description of applicant institutions, their specific roles, their ability to collaborate including past examples, and their technical and administrative capacity for large-scale research.
4. Proposed methodology, project timeline, main activities and expected outputs, covering both research and capacity-building activities.

Uploads are limited: two-page CVs for each country’s principal investigator, one-page CVs for up to three additional key team members, all combined into a single file, plus signed letters of commitment from every lead and co-applicant organization.

IDRC also asks applicants to disclose whether generative AI was used in preparing any application materials — for writing, coding, design or data analysis. Applicants remain fully responsible for their content. Disclose honestly; the request is framed as data-gathering on current practice, not as a disqualifier.

Screening, Selection and the Competitive Squeeze

EOIs go through an administrative completeness check, then eligibility review against the relevant countries’ administrative requirements. Failure to demonstrate alignment with a thematic priority means immediate elimination.

The quota mechanism matters for strategy. No more than 40 full proposals will be accepted per thematic area, and no more than 40 full proposals that include any given country. If eligible EOIs exceed those limits, eliminations are made by consensus on two criteria: how well the institutional and individual profiles of lead and co-applicants align with the selected research topic and approach, and how well the topic aligns with national and regional development priorities and key end users.

The practical implication is that if your consortium includes a country likely to be heavily subscribed, the fit between your named investigators and your named topic is what carries you through. Generic institutional boilerplate is where applications lose at this stage.

Full Proposal Scoring

Invited teams submit substantially expanded documents by 4 December 2026. Independent peer review scores them on three weighted blocks.

High quality research for impact — 65%. Assessed through IDRC’s Research Quality Plus framework across scientific rigour, research legitimacy (negative consequences, equality/diversity/inclusion, engagement with local context), research importance including originality and relevance, and positioning for use covering user engagement and openness. Feasibility of achieving objectives safely and ethically also sits in this block. Novelty must be visible in at least one dimension — concept, methodology, dataset, object of study — and a research gap must be identifiable. Meta-analyses are permitted where the approach or object is itself novel.

Team composition and strength — 25%. Technical expertise and track record, institutional strength, previous collaborations, equity of the collaboration arrangement, and inclusivity.

Capacity-building — 10%. Benefits to graduate students, early-career researchers and postdoctoral fellows, and to the institutions themselves, with gender and inclusivity considerations integrated.

Projects scoring at least 75% form the fundable set. Final selections are then shaped by available funding in each country and by thematic and geographic balance across the cohort — so a fundable score does not guarantee an award.

Funded projects must comply with IDRC’s Open Access Policy and Open Data Statement of Principles, plus any additional council requirements. A Stage 1 data management plan is required at full proposal. Ethics approval from an institutional or national body is required before research begins; where no such body exists, applicants must propose how they will constitute one.

Timeline

• 3 July 2026 — Call launched
• 23 July and 13 August 2026 — Information webinars (same content, recorded and posted to the call page)
• 25 September 2026, 23:59 EDT — EOI deadline
• 9 October 2026 — Eligibility screening and country review
• 19 October 2026 — Shortlisted applicants invited to submit full proposals
• 2 November 2026 — Unsuccessful EOI applicants notified
• 5 November 2026 — Information session for full proposal applicants
• 4 December 2026 — Full proposals due
• 15 February 2027 — Successful applicants informed with detailed feedback
• 15 March 2027 — Unsuccessful applicants notified with summary feedback
• 3 May 2027 — Award and approval

Note the compression between 19 October and 4 December: roughly six weeks to produce a full proposal with a completed budget template, theory of change, risk and safeguarding analysis, knowledge-sharing plan, four-page CVs and up to three letters of support from collaborating institutions and users. Consortia that wait for the invitation before starting that work will be assembling it over the December period across multiple time zones and institutional approval chains.

Preparation Strategy

Build the consortium before you write anything. SGCI runs a matchmaking platform at call.sgci.africa specifically to help researchers find partners. Use it early. Consortium formation is the long pole, because each institution needs internal sign-off to issue a signed letter of commitment by 25 September.

Verify stream eligibility country by country. A partner in a country not funding your stream is not a co-applicant, full stop.

Set the budget against national ceilings first. Work out what each member can actually receive, then design a project that fits — rather than designing a project and discovering the money is not there.

Start the letters of commitment now. Signed institutional letters from three to six organizations across three to six countries take weeks, not days.

Ground the work in named frameworks. Beyond STISA-2034, the call points to Agenda 2063, the Africa Health Strategy, the Health Research and Innovation Strategy for Africa, CAADP, the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa, the Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy, the AfCFTA and the African Energy Transition Strategy. Where relevant, link to AUDA-NEPAD, African Union technical agencies, or Africa CDC. Reviewers assess relevance to African STI and development priorities explicitly.

Leverage rather than duplicate. The call asks proposals to build on existing data and infrastructure to maximize value for money. Show what already exists and what your project adds.

Treat equality and inclusion as design, not decoration. Annex 3 sets out a detailed reflective framework covering power dynamics, intersectional identity factors, a theory of change for equality outcomes, disaggregated data collection, pre- and post-project gender analysis, team composition, and dedicated budget lines for inclusion staffing and activities. EDI sits inside the 65% research quality block, not beside it.

Common Mistakes

• Treating partners as collaborators rather than co-applicants that each administer funds.
• Putting two institutions from the same country forward as co-applicants — only one per country is permitted, with others joining as subgrantees.
• Nominating a principal investigator who is not in full-time employment at the applicant institution.
• Missing a country-specific requirement, such as Tanzania’s exclusion of salaries and overheads or South Africa’s historically disadvantaged institution requirement.
• Exceeding the 13% indirect cost cap, or a lower country-specific rate.
• Proposing a project longer than 36 months, or forgetting that final reporting sits inside that window.
• Writing a cross-cutting proposal without clearly declaring a primary stream.
• Submitting a lead-institution proposal when the PI has already submitted as lead elsewhere.
• Budgeting significant sums for major equipment, which is explicitly discouraged.
• Routing funds to a non-African partner institution.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a one-stage or two-stage call? Two stages. The 25 September 2026 deadline is for a short expression of interest; only shortlisted consortia are invited to submit a full proposal by 4 December 2026.

Can I apply as an individual researcher? No. Applications come from institutions forming a consortium, and each institution nominates a principal investigator.

How many proposals can I be on? You may lead only one, but you may be a co-applicant on more than one.

Can private-sector or civil society organizations take part? Yes, and their participation is encouraged, particularly where they are end users or stakeholders — but generally as participants under one of the co-applicants rather than as lead or co-applicant institutions, unless a country annex says otherwise. Ethiopia and Ghana, for example, name startups, SMEs and private-sector organizations among eligible applicants; South Africa allows their participation but not as PI.

What language can I apply in? English, French or Portuguese. A Portuguese version of the call document is available on the IDRC page.

Who issues the grant? Where possible, each national science granting council issues the grant to recipient institutions in its own country. Where that is not possible, IDRC or another council may issue it directly.

Will more projects be funded if extra money appears? IDRC and the participating councils reserve the right to fund additional proposals if more funding becomes available. They also reserve the right to cancel the call at any time without notice.

Who do I contact with questions? [email protected]. Inquiries must arrive at least 36 hours before the submission deadline to receive a response, and questions affecting all applicants are added to the published FAQ document.

Official Links

• Call page: Supporting STISA 2034: SGCI Multilateral Research Call
• Full call for proposals document, including all three annexes: detailed call document
• Frequently asked questions: SGCI multilateral call FAQ
• Consortium matchmaking platform: call.sgci.africa
• Application portal: IDRC SurveyMonkey Apply
• Contact: [email protected]

Next Steps

If you already have partners in two other participating countries and your topic maps onto a named research avenue, this is worth the effort now — the EOI is short enough that a well-formed consortium can produce it in a few focused weeks. If you do not yet have partners, the matchmaking platform is the first stop, and you should be realistic about whether three institutions can reach signed letters of commitment before 25 September.

Either way, the two documents to read in full before writing anything are the call for proposals and Annex 1. Between them they determine which countries can join your consortium, how much each can receive, and what additional national conditions apply to your team composition. Every other decision follows from those.