Current partners
The Association of Countrywide Innovation Hubs (ACIH) is a network of innovation hubs dedicated to driving entrepreneurship, collaboration, and growth across Kenya. Its primary objective is to promote the activities and programmes of the member hubs, with a vision of testing and building impactful sustainable businesses in rural and peri-urban areas outside Nairobi.
Small Foundation is supporting the ACIH to engage with a network approach to enhance regional collaboration, national integration, and pan-African learning and collaboration. Through this one-year partnership, Small Foundation will support the ACIH to organise regional networking sessions, host a national networking summit, and engage more meaningfully with AfriLabs.
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www.countrywidehubs.orgNetwork Spotlight – Impact in 2025
In 2025, the Association of Countrywide Innovation Hubs (ACIH) consolidated its role as a national backbone organisation for Kenya’s grassroots innovation ecosystem, growing its network from around 140 to over 150 member organisations and increasing paid memberships from 50 to 65 across seven regional clusters spanning the coast, North Rift, North Eastern, Central Rift, Mt Kenya and Aberdares, Metropolitan and Eastern, and Lake Basin regions.
The Association’s flagship achievement was the launch of the Countrywide Digital Innovation Network (CDIN) Platform, developed in partnership with the RISA Fund and the UK’s FCDO and unveiled at the Kenya School of Government in Nairobi; the platform provides ecosystem mapping, opportunity sharing, toolkits, resources and cross-county collaboration to give visibility to innovation actors from Nyeri to Kisumu to Turkana.
With support from Small Foundation, ACIH delivered a series of seven regional networking convenings throughout the year which attracted 270 participants in total, culminating in a National Convening in Kisumu in November that brought together 65 hub representatives from at least 27 counties for listening circles, team-building, and an innovation safari, and which formally adopted a national target of at least one successful inter-regional collaboration per region by 2026.
On the continental stage, ACIH hosted a dedicated side event on sustainable hub financing at the AfriLabs Annual Gathering in Nairobi, facilitating the participation of 30 Kenyan hubs. To translate momentum into practice, ACIH also published two practical resources, the Hub-Based Startup Funding Toolkit and the Toolkit for Building Sustainability into African Innovation Hubs aimed at moving member hubs beyond donor dependency toward financially resilient, impact-driven operations.
