Programme Thesis
Emergent Ventures (Mercatus Center, Tyler Cowen) is a low-overhead fellowship and grant program that makes fast, idiosyncratic bets on 'brilliant minds' with highly scalable, zero-to-one ideas for meaningfully improving society. It exists to unlock talent that institutional gatekeepers systematically undervalue — the autodidact, the outsider, the precocious builder — and has a dedicated Africa & Caribbean vertical (managed by Rasheed Griffith, funded by Schmidt Futures) specifically for LMIC-based applicants. Unlike most grants, it has no fixed amount or rigid rubric: Tyler Cowen makes personal judgment calls, grants range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars, and the bar is 'would I invest in this person's trajectory?'
Selection Criteria
• ZERO-TO-ONE: Is the idea genuinely novel — not incremental improvement of existing work, but something that creates a new category?
• SCALABLE IMPACT: Does the project have a plausible path to outsized societal benefit at scale, not just local/marginal improvement?
• TALENT SIGNAL: Does the applicant display unusual ability or output-per-resource that institutional systems haven't captured? Tyler values precocity, self-direction, and proven initiative above credentials.
• EXECUTABILITY: Is there evidence the applicant can actually do the thing? Shipped products, preprints, platforms, early traction — all count heavily vs. pure proposals.
• LEVERAGE: Will the grant unlock something that wouldn't happen otherwise? (Career travel, prototype, institutional access, visibility)
• AFRICA/CARIBBEAN TRACK ELIGIBILITY: For the Rasheed Griffith vertical — applicants based in or originating from Africa or the Caribbean; emphasis on cross-border mobility, science, and institution-building in those regions. Nigerian applicants explicitly eligible (Emmanuel Nnadi, Nigeria, was funded in the 6th Africa cohort).
• No age, degree, or institutional affiliation requirement. Pre-PhD, independent researchers, and undergrads all regularly win.
• Application is deliberately lightweight (~3 questions, ~500 words). Clarity and directness are rewarded; padding and academic hedging are penalised.
Past Winners / Cohort Profiles
Winners are idiosyncratic but cluster into recognisable archetypes: (1) Precocious young builders (Minh Nguyen, 16, space debris; Harishvin Sasikumar, 17, brain interfaces; Annika Baberwal, 8th grade, race-car aerodynamics); (2) Outsider researchers doing unconventional science without institutional support (Ruxandra Tesloianu, Cambridge/Romania, bio/metascience; Lucio Aurelio Moreira Menezes, Fortaleza/Stanford, computational biology); (3) Africa/Caribbean track winners doing science mobility grants (Emmanuel Nnadi, Nigeria, microbiologist → visiting research at Waterloo for phage therapy; Tony Odhiambo, Kenya undergrad at MIT; Alex Kyabarongo, Uganda DVM → grad school in USA biosecurity; Rupert Tawiah-Quashie, Ghana → Harvard internship in symbolic AI reasoning); (4) Platform/product builders solving undersupplied problems (Jamie Rumbelow & Dashwood, London, land rights software; Abdoulaye Faye, Senegal, building Catyu robotics firm). The Africa track notably includes solo researchers, career-development grants, and institution-building projects — not just startups. Grant sizes are unstated publicly but EV has funded everything from travel grants (~$1K) to multi-year career grants (~$50K+).
Ideal Candidate Fingerprint
The platonic EV winner is someone Tyler Cowen would describe as 'the best at something no one has noticed yet' — a self-directed, high-output individual operating outside or ahead of institutional recognition, with a concrete idea that has asymmetric upside for the world. For the Africa track specifically, the ideal applicant is building or doing something in/from Africa that creates spillovers (knowledge, tools, institutions) beyond themselves, and for whom a modest EV grant meaningfully changes trajectory rather than being marginal top-up funding.
Recommended Framing
Eniola should apply explicitly via the Africa & Caribbean track (contact Rasheed Griffith at rasheed@mercatus.gmu.edu) and frame her application around a single sharp claim: she has built a novel addiction-prevention science platform — solo, from Lagos, without institutional backing — that is now deployable as a clinical screening tool (IMPRINT) with a plausible path to reaching tens of millions of patients in LMIC contexts where addiction-liability screening is nonexistent. The zero-to-one hook is concrete: CCT is the first tripartite pharmacological model of reward-memory encoding prevention, now validated computationally (85.8% reduction in encoding probability), with three preprints, three shipped platforms, and endorsements from four named Tier-1 neuroscientists — all produced outside any university in under two years. The grant ask should be framed as a leverage point: fund the IMPRINT clinical pilot design or a research visit to one of her collaborator labs (Berridge/Michigan, Gershman/Harvard) that unlocks the next stage. She must lead with the builder/product framing, not the 'independent researcher' framing — Tyler Cowen funds people who are doing, not people who are studying.
Watch Out
• The URL in the programme listing (fortuna.provable.dev) is a third-party event aggregator, not the official EV application portal — Eniola should apply directly at mercatus.org/emergent-ventures and separately email Rasheed Griffith (rasheed@mercatus.gmu.edu) to flag the Africa/Caribbean track interest, as the two tracks appear to have separate pipelines.
• EV grant amounts are discretionary and unstated — she should not anchor her proposal to a specific dollar amount but instead describe what a grant would unlock (travel, compute access, pilot study costs).
• The 'independent researcher' self-label may read as 'unfunded academic' rather than 'builder' in Cowen's frame — she must foreground platforms built and quantitative results shipped, not just papers written.
• No red flags on eligibility: Nigerian nationality, Africa-based, no degree or affiliation requirements, rolling deadline. She is strongly eligible.