Road to COP26’s Innovation Grant Programme
The Road to COP26 Innovation Grant Programme is a partnership between Kathmandu University with Applied Arts Scotland and Edinburgh Napier University’s Creative Informatics. It is supported by the National Innovation Center Nepal. The programme is part of a campaign of activities implemented by the British Council with support from the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) Nepal.
The Programme partners are inviting applications from individuals and teams based in Nepal with new, exciting and innovative ideas for sustainable businesses. These businesses will harness nature-based and craft-related solutions to promote positive environmental impacts for Nepal (and perhaps beyond). Nature-based solutions are actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits. Such actions are necessary to strengthen adaptation and resilience to global challenges such as climate change. Your ideas will introduce new ways of working with nature-based processes and craft-related practices and entrepreneurship that support climate change resilience generally and Nepali communities specifically. Your ideas might also be applicable to or replicable by communities in other countries.
Any and all ideas related to nature-based solutions and craft-related practices with positive environmental impacts and that support climate change resilience in Nepal are welcomed. It can be a completely new idea or something you have been working on already, but as a minimum we expect you to have begun to discover more about and define your idea. The idea could be for a completely new process, service or object, or for improvements to ones that already exist, and for small or large businesses.
If your application is successful, you will be invited to take part in an incubator event to further develop your ideas and your thinking around these. After the incubator event, you will have the opportunity, if desired, to apply for additional support to help you take your idea(s) from concept to reality; and to showcase your work in Nepal and the UK in the lead up to COP26.
