Grand Challenge: Innovative Data and Modeling approaches to measure Women’s Health

This Grand Challenge prioritizes solutions that leverage data sources that are existing or under development rather than relying on new, large-scale data collection efforts, ensuring sustainability and feasibility.

Objectives

• They invite applicants to explore bold, innovative approaches. Specifically, the objectives of the Challenge will be to:
  • Reimagine new ways to understand and measure women’s health that extend beyond the limitations of existing composite indicators such as DALY.
  • Use existing data sets or easily collectible datasets to quantify women’s health outcomes across countries. While this Grand Challenge does not fund large-scale data collection, proposals may include small-scale data expansion where it is feasible, policy-relevant, and significantly enhances gendered analysis.
  • Design innovative methodologies that incorporate gendered, socio-cultural, economic, and structural determinants of health, ensuring a comprehensive gender-sensitive approach (A gender-sensitive approach takes into consideration how one’s gender impacts access to services, risk and protective factors and barriers that are uniquely experienced because of one’s gender in a society).
  • Create tools or frameworks that enable cross-cultural or subnational comparative analysis, identifying context-specific gaps and progress.
  • Reflect the interconnected dimensions of women’s health across the life course
• Incorporate gaps in the measurement of:
  • Skills, knowledge, and networks: addressing how gender disparities in education, training, and professional networks impact health access, decision making, and service delivery.
  • Supply and access to services: examining how health systems, financing mechanisms, and gender-based barriers affect the availability, affordability, and accessibility of essential services for women
  • Health and economic impacts: capturing the intersection of health outcomes with economic participation, caregiving burdens, workforce inclusion, and financial independence.
• Produce outputs that are:
  • Methodologically rigorous: applying sound data science, statistical modeling, or analytical techniques that enhance the validity and reliability of women’s health measurements.
  • Interpretable and actionable: ensuring results can be understood and applied by policymakers and implementers.
  • Comparative and scalable: enabling cross-cultural or subnational analysis to identify patterns, disparities, and opportunities for intervention.
  • Gender-sensitive and intersectional: incorporating the social, economic, and structural determinants that affect women’s health outcomes.
  • Policy-relevant and decision-oriented: providing insights that have the potential to directly inform policies, resource allocation, or program design to improve women’s health measurement and action.

Funding Information

• They will consider proposals for 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. They 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. They also encourage collaborative submissions across disciplines such as economics, public health, and gender studies.
• They 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.

Ineligibility Criteria

• They will not fund proposals that:
  • Propose data collection-only efforts without a clear link to the development or testing of novel measurement approaches or without an analytical component that adds value to existing evidence.
  • Focus on implementing health interventions without a measurement or modeling component.
  • Focus solely on expanding or refining existing composite indicators (e.g., DALY) without demonstrating innovation.
  • Rely on proprietary or inaccessible datasets without clear justification or ability to share insights publicly.
  • Lack a gender-sensitive lens or fail to consider the intersectional factors affecting women’s health outcomes.

For more information, visit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.