The SWFF 4th Global Call for Innovations closed on October 10, and 553 organizations from 91 countries submitted applications. Seventy-four percent of applicants are from developing countries, and 89 percent are new to USAID or other partner funding.

SWFF will announce the winners in March 2017 at the GEC.

Four-hundred-and-twenty-three applicants identified as Stage 1 (market-driven product), and 130 as Stage 2 (scaling/commercial growth). Just over a third are commercial enterprises (34%), about a third are NGOs (32%), and about 20% came from higher education institutions or research organizations.

Just over half (53%) of the applicants identify as having a “combined” innovation that is both a business model and a technology. About a third registered their innovation as a technology (28%) and one-fifth (18%) as a business model.

SWFF will announce the winners in March 2017 at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) in Johannesburg, South Africa, where entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, policymakers and other startup champions from more than 160 countries convene to identify new ways to start and scale new ventures around the world.