Brendan created the Sustainable Africa Initiative as a collaboration between The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF)  and the Climate Risk Research Foundation, a (501c3) not-for-profit founded by Brendan. The collaboration is a result of a long-term friendship between Harvard Business School classmates Mr. Brendan Reilly and Mr. Tony Elumelu. Tony is the Chairman of United Bank of Africa, Chairman of Heirs Corp, Chairman of TransCorp and was named as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People In The World according to Time Magazine. By collaborating together on this Initiative they hope to mitigate the impacts of climate change on Africa and help build a more sustainable world.

The core objective of the Sustainable Africa Initiative is to equip the Africa agriculture sector with data, tools, and knowledge essential for developing and executing science-based strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate risks. These strategies aim to bolster crop resilience, elevate agricultural output, and notably diminish the count of individuals in Africa afflicted by persistent hunger, malnutrition, and starvation.  

In 2023 Brendan launched a first-of-its-kind event in Nigeria, the Climate Risk Research Challenge – Nigeria 2023. Over 240 Nigerian students from 10 Universities participated. With donations that Brendan was able to secure from Amazon and Goldman Sachs SAI was able to provide Africa students access to data, tools, models, cloud-compute infrastructure, training, technical support and in-kind funding needed to assess agriculture-based climate risks facing Africa and identify potential solutions needed to win the Challenge.