Call yet to Open for 2015
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) along with the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and UK’s Department of International Development (DFID) are jointly inviting grant proposals from organizations to facilitate groundbreaking prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns in poor, hard-to-reach communities around the time of childbirth.
Seed grant of approximately $250,000 USD for up to 2 years is provided to support the development and validation of ideas capable of impacting health outcomes for pregnant women and their newborns in low-resource settings.
Funding Priorities
- Science & Technology: bold ideas for scientific and technological advances that prevent, detect or treat maternal and newborn problems, prior to conception, during the antenatal period, at the time of birth and in the early postnatal period in the home, community or in peripheral health facilities.
- Service Delivery: bold ideas for new approaches to provide high-quality labor and delivery services and pre and postnatal care, including postpartum family planning and PMTCT.
- Demand: bold ideas for empowering and engaging women of reproductive age, their families and their communities at large to practice healthy behaviors and be aware of and access health care during pregnancy, childbirth and the early postnatal period, especially the first two days after birth. These should be ideas that reduce economic, social and political barriers to seeking, accessing, and receiving evidence-based care.
Areas of Interest
- Approaches to prevent stillbirth and preterm birth
- Approaches targeting individual and collective behaviors and social norms (particularly gender. inequality) to increase access, uptake and retention in antenatal care, facility based labor and delivery and postnatal care.
- Simple, low-cost technologies adapted or designed for use in hard-toreach, low-resource settings.
- Mechanisms to improve referral and transportation of mothers with complications and sick newborns.
- Ways that ICT can be used to improve health, healthcare delivery, and accountability for maternal and newborn health in low-resource areas in new, measurable, low-cost and integrated ways.
- Interventions that reduce barriers to accessing or receiving appropriate treatment and evidence-based care.
- Solutions that recognize the critical roles of the end-user in the development process.
Funding Categories
Seed Funds: to support the development and validation of innovative solutions capable of positively impacting health outcomes for pregnant women and their babies in low-resource settings. Around 25 projects are supported in each round with approximately USD 250,000 each. Solutions integrating science and technology, service delivery and demand creation in innovative ways are encouraged. Projects will be funded for up to two years.
Transition to Scale Funds: to develop, refine, and rigorously test the impact of integrated solutions that have strong evidence in a controlled or limited setting of promising health outcomes and/or the reduction of significant barrier(s) to health and demand for the solution. Around 5 projects are supported in each round with approximately USD 2 Million each. Projects will be funded for up to four years. These integrated solutions have the potential to credibly scale to improve the lives of millions of pregnant women and newborns in multiple countries.
Eligibility Criteria
- Applicants can be any type of organizations – non-profit, for profit, faith based, foundations, academic institutions, civic groups and regional organizations.
- Applicants must have operational focus in low-income countries and those with focus on middle-income countries as defined by the World Bank.
- Organizations based in or applications with an operational focus in Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria are not eligible.
- Individuals and governments are not eligible to apply.
- Publicly funded universities or universities with government affiliations can apply.
- Interventions should substantially increase demand for and access to primary health intervention for women and newborns; improve the quality of care as measured by health outcomes; and improve and sustain healthy behaviors.
- For Seed Funds
- Proposed solutions may have been previously tested but should not be current standard practice. Innovative variations on existing approaches may be considered.
- Incremental solutions that are only slight improvements over existing approaches are not eligible.
- Previous Saving Lives at Birth seed grantees are eligible to apply.
- For Transition Funds
- Projects must have strong evidence in a controlled or limited setting of promising health outcome(s) and/or the reduction of significant barrier(s) to health (i.e., proof of concept) and demand for the solution to warrant expanded support.
- Applicants must provide sufficient and credible evidence to demonstrate their proof of concept and the link to positive impact on maternal and newborn health.
- Transition funds are limited to solutions integrating science and technology, service delivery, and demand creation domains in innovative ways.
- Some innovations may require testing at various levels (local, regional, and across several regions) in the transition stage.
More information about this Seed Funding Opportunity is available in the PDF version. If you are a FundsforNGOs Premium Member, you can instantly download this PDF version. Not a Premium Member? Click here to Sign up! Not interested? Continue reading…
