April 25, 2026, is the deadline for Sub-Saharan women’s organisations to apply for an opportunity with Gender & AI Innovation Collective
by Piyush Mathur
No, no, no! If you are just an innovative individual, you are ineligible to apply for the next cohort of the Gender & AI Innovation Collective (GAIC), floated by the A+ Alliance!
You have to be part of a Sub-Saharan organisation that focusses predominantly on women’s rights—or an organisation led by a woman (or a team of women) and focussing on feminist or human rights—in order to be eligible to join GAIC’s next cohort. Moreover, your organisation must have an approach that engages local people and gets them to participate in its work.
The next cohort, which is only the 2nd in GAIC’s history, will begin its work on May 13, 2026. The application deadline for it is April 25.
This cohort will function entirely online, requiring you to have solid Internet connectivity—and your organisation would have designated you or a team to meet the work commitments—which will be up to 4 hours per week. Your application to the cohort would thus have to be made on behalf of your organisation, though you can join it as an individual: You will have to show in your proposal that you have dedicated hands in your organisation who would assist you or be part of your team as your project moves forward through the training and development phases.
The programme and the types of support the selected will receive
If selected, you or your team will be trained for 8 weeks in ‘Feminist AI, data, models, and impact assessments’, leading to the articulation of ‘a concept paper for an AI solution to a community problem’ that you would have identified. Then, if your concept is found to be promising, your group will receive CAD 7,500 to turn it into a prototype—or if it is decided that your concept is not entirely novel but merely needs to adapt an existing prototype or model to your identified challenge, then your group will receive CAD 3,000.
But on top of either of these two sums, a selected concept would also receive the support of the A+ Alliance engineers, who would help you turn your concept into something practical.
Once something practical is put together—as the teams’ AI solutions to their self-identified local problems—then the most promising of these woud be takn to the next level of ground tests before being considered for being turned into viable products. For this ground-testing phase, the selected groups will receive an additional CAD 15,000!
Get moving!
So, what are you waiting for? If you truly believe that you have got what it takes to be eligible to apply for this 2nd cohort of the Gender & AI Innovation Collective (GAIC), read the full call for this competition in the Portable Document Format (PDF) via this link:
As to what the A+ Alliance is, it is a global, multidisciplinary, coalition focussing on ensuring women’s participation in developing AI-assisted solutions to local challenges typically faced by women. The GAIC programme, incidentally, is co-led by Code for Africa and Women at the Table and funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC/CRDI) and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).
A summary version of this competition for the 2nd cohort can be read here:
https://aplusalliance.org/2026-call-for-applications-gaic/?dub_id=eRcVFHuArizwPam1
All the best!