Introduction:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with the Grand Challenges Network, seeks innovative proposals to develop new measurement models or adapt existing ones to better capture the full scope of women's health burdens and progress.

General Description:
The call focuses on reimagining ways to understand and measure women's health beyond existing composite indicators like DALY. Proposals should leverage existing data sets or easily collectible datasets to quantify women's health outcomes across countries. The challenge encourages the design of innovative methodologies that incorporate gendered, socio-cultural, economic, and structural determinants of health, ensuring a comprehensive gender-sensitive approach. Tools or frameworks should enable cross-cultural or subnational comparative analysis, identifying context-specific gaps and progress. The challenge builds on the Women's Health Innovation Opportunity Map 2023, emphasizing the need for innovation in data and modeling, health and economic impact, supply and access to services, and skills, knowledge, and networks.

Awards of up to $150,000 USD for each project, with a grant term of 18-24 months

Eligibility Criteria

This initiative is open to nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. We particularly encourage applications involving projects led by women, early-career researchers and practitioners seeking to innovate in women's health measurement, or from women-led organizations and applications from institutions based in low- and middle-income countries. We also encourage collaborative submissions across disciplines such as economics, public health, and gender studies.

We are looking for proposals that:

• Demonstrate innovative thinking in modeling women's health, providing creative methodologies or tools to address gaps in measurement.
• Leverage existing data sources and/or explore datasets that are feasible to collect within current capacities.
• Incorporate intersectional approaches, addressing disparities (social, economic, and structural determinants of health) that disproportionately impact women.
• Align with the Opportunity Map dimensions, focusing on multidimensional indicators beyond traditional composite measures.
• Show potential to generate actionable insights for policy and programmatic interventions at a national and/or global scale.
• Enable cross-country or subnational comparisons, offering solutions that reveal context-specific gaps and opportunities for progress.
• Present a clear pathway for real-world impact, outlining how the outputs can inform resource allocation, policy, or program design.
• Highlight the potential for scalability and adaptability of the proposed approach across diverse country contexts.
• Promote interdisciplinary collaboration, combining perspectives from multiple sectors such as public health, data science, economics, and gender studies.

In case of interest, please click on 'm'interessa' and we will contact you