Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeks to fund solutions that address specific challenges

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is inviting applications that address specific challenges defined in the grant programs.

The Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations is seeking innovative global health and development solutions and is now accepting proposals for its latest application round. Applicants can be at any experience level; in any discipline; and from any organization, including colleges and universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-profit organizations, and for-profit companies. Initial grants will be US $100,000 each, and projects showing promise will have the opportunity to receive additional funding of up to US $1 million.

Proposals are being accepted online until November 11, 2015 for the challenges below:

• Novel Approaches to Characterizing and Tracking the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance
• Explore New Solutions in Global Health Priority Areas
• Addressing Newborn and Infant Gut Health Through Bacteriophage-Mediated Microbiome Engineering
• Explore New Ways to Measure Delivery and Use of Digital Financial Services Data

The New Interventions for Global Health: Vaccine Manufacturing challenge focuses on innovations in vaccine manufacturing platforms designed to lower production cost for vaccines that target diseases of great global burden and that are among the most costly to produce with current technologies.

Letters of Intent will be accepted until November 5, 2015. Read more about this grant opportunity here.

Furthermore, the African Academy of Sciences and the New Partnership for African Development have launched Grand Challenges Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. This program joins others within the Grand Challenges family of grant programs supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners. Grand Challenges Africa will build on the global success of Grand Challenges programs in India, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as the strong base of Africa Grand Challenges grantees already funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and USAID. More information could be gotten on AAS website.