The Challenge
This request for proposal seeks innovative approaches to modeling of women’s health issues or of broader health topics that incorporate a gender lens. We are looking for projects with a 1-to-3-year timeline that will achieve at least one of the objectives below:

• 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

Priority will be given to proposals that 1) advance broad access to data to support gender intentional modelling to improve women’s health and 2) enable strong evidence-based practices to guide policy decisions.

The desired outcome of this request for proposals is to build a modeling and analytics ecosystem focusing on applying a gender intentional lens to achieve gender equality in women’s health and to facilitate South- South collaborations. Grantees should be able to, over time, answer questions on how their proposal to increase empowerment of modelers, in particular women modelers, at a local level would reduce the impact of issues that disproportionately impact women’s health over the next 10 years in each geography.Funding level

The funding level for the Building Data Modeling Capacity for Gender Equality Project is a grant of up to $500,000 USD, provided to the organization, with a term of up to 1-to-3-years. Application budgets should be commensurate with the scope of work proposed. Any indirect costs should be included in the USD $500,000 (subject to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s indirect cost policy).

Selected proposals will become part of a coordinated program aiming at Strengthening Data Science Capacity and the Ecosystem to Enable Data-Centered and Gender Aware Public Health Interventions. We seek to build a network of researchers working together in close collaboration with the existing Data Science Grand Challenges network and its partners to build on lessons learned in different regions and further develop processes, tools and governance that maximize the impact of data-focused research studies, as well as identify and address the global data-related challenges.