Strengthening Modeling and Analytics Capacity and Ecosystem for Women’s Health

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has issued an RFP to strengthen the modeling and analytics capacity and ecosystem for women’s health.

According to the foundation, mathematical modeling and analytics are valuable tools for informing policy and programmatic decisions, and there have been many successful examples in global health using disease burden estimation, modeling, and forecasting. It has become increasingly clear that these approaches will need to incorporate a gender lens, either because women and girls comprise a greater share of the remaining burden, or because they hold the keys to a more efficient solution.

There are few modelers in low-and-middle-income countries (LMICs) 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. Therefore, there is significant opportunity to facilitate collaboration among women’s health modelers in LMICs, address gender biases in existing methodologies, extend uses of tools and platforms to better account for gendered effects, generate solid evidence to facilitate policy changes, and provide a global public good for gender equality that can improve how we allocate internal resources and engage partners to use data to make better decisions.

This RFP seeks innovative approaches to modeling of women’s health issues or of broader health topics that incorporate a gender lens. A grant of up to $500,000 will be awarded over a term of  one to-three years. The foundation seeks projects that will achieve at least one of the following objectives: increase the number of trained modelers, especially women with gender expertise based in LMICs; achieve a better understanding of issues that disproportionately affect women through modeling; or improve engagement with modeling approaches to support strategic planning and/or evaluation work.

Ideally, proposals should also bring together discrete modeling units across LMICs to share expertise; enable South-South data-centered collaborations, knowledge transfer, and build on and 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; and 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.

This initiative is open to organizations based in LMICs, including nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions. Collaborations with global partners is acceptable; at least 80 percent of the funding must be awarded directly to organizations based in LMICs. Individuals and organizations classified as individuals for U.S. tax purposes are not eligible to receive grants as part of this initiative.

For complete program guidelines and application instructions, see the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation website.