Thirty-two climate companies receive $500K in grants from Village Capital

Village Capital has declared the end of the three-year Empowering Sustainable Entrepreneurship Africa (ESEA) program, which was designed to improve locally driven entrepreneurial ecosystems and increase access to funding for climate businesses throughout Africa.

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, or Norad, and Village Capital have joined to manage ESEA, which was founded on the fundamental idea that businesses do not grow in isolation.

Village Capital collaborated with fourteen locally-led ecosystem builders in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania through ESEA to bolster their organizations and develop a co-delivery model for founder support. Building on this base, it collaborated with five ecosystem builders in 2025 to jointly provide investment-readiness programs for 150 climate entrepreneurs in each of the five markets.

Village Capital has given US$500,000 in grant support to 32 entrepreneurs tackling important environmental issues throughout the continent as the project comes to an end. Startups focused on climate adaptation earned US$225,000, the greatest portion of investment. US$125,000 went to food security entrepreneurs, US$100,000 to blue economy startups, and US$50,000 to sustainable energy startups.

“At Village Capital, we’ve learned that the challenge isn’t a lack of entrepreneurial talent. Too often, the challenge is that the systems around entrepreneurs are not designed to help promising startups access the networks, resources, and capital they need to grow,” said Nakami Walunywa, regional director for Africa at Village Capital.

“ESEA gave us an opportunity to test what happens when you work through local organisations that are deeply embedded in their markets. We saw how local knowledge, trusted founder relationships, and ecosystem intelligence can help surface stronger pipelines and create more effective pathways between entrepreneurs and capital. Those lessons are shaping how we think about ecosystem building, not as a parallel effort to investing, but as essential infrastructure for directing capital where it can create the greatest long-term value.”