Emergent Ventures (Africa & Caribbean vertical) funds individuals with genuinely 'zero to one' ideas that advance prosperity, liberty, or wellbeing — projects so novel and high-upside that mainstream funders would never back them. Launched June 2023, the Africa track is managed by Rasheed Griffith (himself an EV recipient) under Tyler Cowen's direction with Schmidt Futures backing, and runs on the same philosophy as the parent programme: fast, low-bureaucracy bets on people over credentials. It exists because Tyler Cowen believes the best mechanism for driving human progress is finding exceptional individuals early and getting out of their way.

• Zero-to-one framing: the idea must create something genuinely new — not iterative improvement on existing work • Scalability potential: the project must be able to affect many people, not just a local audience • Personal narrative coherence: the applicant's backstory must meaningfully connect to and explain why they are the right person for this specific project • Reverse-contrarianism signal: applicants must answer 'one mainstream view you agree with' — tested specifically to distinguish people with real intellectual courage from reflexive contrarians • Revenue or self-sufficiency path: explicitly favoured ('a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature, not a bug') • Unconventional background or non-institutional positioning is a plus, not a minus — Tyler is actively looking for people outside normal credentialling pipelines • Africa/Caribbean geographic nexus: the Africa track prioritises proposals that are clearly rooted in or benefit the African/Caribbean context • Minimum eligibility: age 13+; no nationality, credential, or sector restrictions • Proposal length: ≤1500 words; must stand on its own before supplementary materials are reviewed • Note: supplementary file uploads do NOT accept PDFs — all preprints and papers must be linked as URLs/multimedia links

The Africa & Caribbean track has now run 7 cohorts (through Nov 2025). Winner archetypes span: (a) researchers using a grant to access a global institution they could not otherwise reach (Emmanuel Nnadi, Nigeria, phage therapy visiting research at Waterloo; Jibrin Jaafaru, Nigeria, bioinformatics fellowship in the US; Rupert Tawiah-Quashie, Ghana, Harvard internship on symbolic reasoning in AI); (b) builders creating first-of-kind infrastructure or products for the continent (Mercy Muwanguzi/Kwesiga Pather, Uganda, sanitation robotics; Abdoulaye Faye, Senegal, remotely operated robot firm; Rose Mutiso, Kenya, African Tech Futures Lab for energy policy); (c) career development and travel grants for exceptional students and early-career researchers (Tony Odhiambo, Kenya/MIT, math olympiad training; Isaac Akintaro, Nigeria/England CS PhD, Silicon Valley travel; Katharine Patterson, Botswana, NASA JPL robotics internship); (d) institution-builders creating intellectual infrastructure Africa lacks (Phumiani Majozi, South Africa, classical liberal think tank; Ken Opalo, blogging on African economic development). Nigeria is prominently represented in recent cohorts. Science and computational research are recurring themes — bioengineering (Michael Konu, virtual cells), mRNA optimisation (Joshua Payne), bioinformatics (Jibrin Jaafaru), and AI (Rupert Tawiah-Quashie). Grant sizes are unstated publicly but understood to range from travel stipends to $50K+.

The platonic EV Africa applicant is a high-agency individual at the frontier of their field who is visibly the only person likely to do this particular thing — someone operating outside traditional institutional pipelines (or despite them) who can articulate in ≤1500 words a clear personal narrative explaining why they exist at this intersection, what genuinely new thing they are building, and why Africa specifically needs it. They have already started — there is evidence of execution, not just a plan. Tyler Cowen personally reads every application and is specifically attracted to people who demonstrate unusual intellectual self-directedness and have an unconventional route to a problem that others missed.