Deadline: October 21, 2025
Applications are open for the UNICEF Climate Innovation Challenge 2025. This is a call to early and growth stage frontier tech start-ups in emerging economies. UNICEF is launching a call for solutions from emerging markets in collaboration with India Health Fund (IHF), and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). To maximize impact, UNICEF will foster collaboration between early-stage frontier tech ventures and help scale proven climate adaptation solutions. This dual track approach seeks to drive impact and provide long-term sustainability.
They also invite value-aligned partners to support innovation challenges, design sprints and deliver strategic technical assistance to build greater equity and trust across technological solutions.
Through this challenge, they seek to:
- conduct a market mapping of child-centric climate innovators operating across emerging markets
- create capacity by offering mentorship and technical assistance from UNICEF Venture Fund experts to selected start-ups, enhancing their investment readiness and potential for future funding. This will comprise:
- 10 hours of technical mentoring consisting of open source, business development, frontier technology, software development and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mentorship
- additional support to understand and navigate the UNICEF Venture Fund sourcing and selection process
- highlight investable solutions that demonstrate public good and market opportunity
The UNICEF Venture Fund is particularly seeking solutions that:
- address challenges to accelerate results for children
- are optimized for low-resource environments (e.g., low connectivity or limited mobile access)
- focus on reducing, rather than widening, inequalities, delivering results for diverse users and communities
- can deliver in multiple languages, including local and less used languages
Eligibility
Companies need to fulfil the following mandatory selection criteria to be considered:
- be registered as a private for-profit company
- be registered in a UNICEF programme country (See the list of eligible countries here)
- have a working prototype or minimum viable product of the proposed solution, ideally, showing promising results
- be open source or willing to be open source
- have the potential to positively impact the lives of the most vulnerable children
- generate publicly exposed real-time data that is measurable
Application
For more information, visit UNICEF.
