Global Grand Challenge Call for Applications: Strengthening Modeling and Analytics Capacity and Ecosystem for Women’s Health

The Global Grand Challenge is calling for applications to the Strengthening Modeling and Analytics Capacity and Ecosystem for Women’s Health grant.

There are few modelers in low-and-middle-income (LMIC) settings focused on health issues that disproportionally affect women, especially adolescent girls and young women (AGYW), as well as a lack of access to gender-disaggregated data sources. Currently, many units contributing to efforts in these topic areas are based primarily in academic institutions in the Global North. We believe modeling is most impactful when conducted by local partners, with local data where possible, and co-created with relevant decision makers.This RFP seeks innovative approaches to modeling of women’s health issues or of broader health topics that incorporate a gender lens.

Objectives:

• Increase the number of trained modelers, especially women with gender expertise based in low-income and middle-income countries
• Achieve a better understanding of issues that disproportionately affect women through modeling
• Improve engagement with modeling approaches to support strategic planning and/or evaluation work

Ideally, proposals should also:

• Bring together discrete modeling units across low-income and middle-income countries to share expertise
• Enable South-South data-centered collaborations, knowledge transfer, and build on & strengthen existing initiatives and ecosystems
• Foster innovation with data in the interest of their respective local communities and achieving equality in access to health care
• Improve data collection, sharing, governance, regulatory compliance, and analysis processes to enable data-centered and gender aware public health research and interventions
• Explore and improve how to build and strengthen the interface of modeling with policy engagement leading to increased adoption of insights to yield impact

Eligibility:

• Collaborative proposals that are led by investigators in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) – we particularly encourage applications from women-led organizations and applications involving projects led by women
• Proposals that have the potential to have impact on addressing women’s health issues within the proposed budget and timeframe of 1-to-3-years
• Proposals that are gender intentional or transformative:
  • Gender intentional investments will, through novel modeling and analytical approaches, increase understanding of impact that gender gaps/barriers have across relevant global health fields
  • Gender transformative investments will, through novel modeling and analytical approaches, increase the understanding of empowerment on reduction of gender gaps/barriers across relevant global health fields
  • Should demonstrate that their approach will increase knowledge and understanding of gender barriers in modeling OR Should display how their methodologies would show impact alleviating a known gender gap/issue would have across relevant global health fields
  • Proposals should also highlight existing expertise around gender and modeling and how it will contribute to both novel methods and expanding the ecosystem
  • Proposals that demonstrate enhancement of the data value chain for gender intentional modelling
• Proposals that have timely access to necessary data. Focus on improving gender modeling capacity in women’s health in LMICs
• Proposals that articulate how the project will lead to impact in the near-term and how those benefits will be sustained past the lifetime of the project
• Proposals that demonstrate engagement with local and/or regional decision makers
• Proposals that are driven by a shared commitment to open science, data sharing, and building collaboration and analysis infrastructure to enable discoveries that will benefit people everywhere
• Note: Global partners may be included. However, priority will be given to proposals that demonstrate at least 80% of the funding is going to LMIC institutions and where the PI is a part of an LMIC institution.

Funding details:

• A grant of up to $500,000
• Duration of up to 1-to-3-years.

Read more here

Application deadline December 16, 2022.