Winning projects for the creative industry recovery fund will be revealed early this week, the organisers have announced. The ceremony was slated for Wednesday, September 16, but organisers said that deliberations were still going on. “This is to inform you that the CCI recovery grant-winning projects will be announced next week” a statement from the organisers reads. The announcement came on the same day preselected contestants concluded a two-day final pitching exercise in Kigali. Launched in July 2020, the initiative is the brainchild of the Ministry of Youth and Culture, and Imbuto Foundation that seeks to support young artists with seed funding and capacity building so as to implement their innovative projects. The idea is to help eventual winners navigate business challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. Only 30 candidates will make it for the grants. The group will be picked from the current list of 45 contestants who made it in the pre-selection phase. The winning projects, according to the organisers, will largely depend on the results of the final pitching exercise. On Tuesday, which was also Day 1 of the pitching exercise, 24 contestants were able to pitch their project proposals, while the rest followed on Wednesday. In contrast however, the organisers also revealed that 2 candidates out of 45 were not able to make it to the pitching phase. “For your information, also note that the panel of judges only heard from 43 contestants, 2 of the contestants were not able to participate in the pitching phase.” Read the statement in part. Besides, Sandrine Umutoni, Director General, Imbuto Foundation, in an earlier interview decried the fact that women are hardly fairly represented in the competition. “We have 20 entries (out of the remaining 45) from ladies,” she pointed out. “This shows that (women) are still reluctant to join this industry owing to a mindset that this is a male-dominated field. It also passes a message that we have to keep encouraging young women not to shy away from taking on such opportunities,” she said. Each of the winners will receive Rwf10 million in seed funding. Alongside the cash prize, Business Professionals Network (BPN), which is the implementing agency, will organise a boot camp where the final winners will be assisted to fine-tune their projects and trained in financial management, she said. The grant will be disbursed in two instalments, with the second coming after an assessment of how the first was used.
