BMGF Opportunities to Advance Women’s Health Innovation

Funding for innovations and ideas in targeted areas that will help to catalyse innovation to improve the health of women.

Founded in 1997, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is a charitable organisation that seeks to improve the health and wellbeing of people in developing countries and within the US, and works to ensure that all people lead healthy, productive lives.

This Opportunities to Advance Women’s Health Innovation call for proposals is part of the Grand Challenges programme, which fosters innovation in order to solve key problems in global health and development for those most in need. The Grand Challenges initiative seeks to focus research and development efforts and engage the world’s best researchers and innovators.

Women’s health is currently an underserved area for innovation, with disproportionately low R&D funding relative to its burden. To address this, the BMGF and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) produced the Women’s Health Innovation Opportunity Map 2023, a collaborative framework representing an inclusive, globally-focused, and widely accepted list of 50 topics in women’s health R&D to advance women’s health innovation.

This funding opportunity will support innovations and ideas that address a wide range (though not all) of the opportunities outlined in the Opportunity Map. Proposals should specifically address the following:

• Data and modelling – Collecting more granular data, strengthening capacity for sex- and gender-informed data collection, and filling critical data gaps.
• Research design and methodologies – Advancing sex- and gender-intentional research design, methods, and analysis.
• Regulatory and science policy – Implementing sex- and gender-intentional regulatory and science policy frameworks that promote the development of innovations that improve the health of women.
• Innovation Introduction – Strengthening the innovation ecosystem and pathways for women’s health solutions to scale.
• Social and structural determinants – Including social determinants of health in R&D in women’s health research agendas to develop more equitable and appropriate women’s health products.
• Training and careers – Embedding a sex and gender lens throughout education and supporting women’s career advancement to develop a workforce able to drive innovation in women’s health.
• Communicable diseases – Evaluating the burden of infectious diseases and their direct and indirect costs, exploring associations between microbes and chronic conditions, and developing innovations for infections that disproportionately impact women and that can benefit pregnant women.
• Female-specific conditions – Researching the aetiology and progression of gynaecological, reproductive, maternal, and life stage conditions; supporting new methods for data collection and sharing; and developing innovations to prevent, diagnose, monitor and treat female-specific conditions.

The overall objectives are to: 

• Advance bold ideas that address opportunities in the Opportunity Map.
• Enhance overall funding and resources for women’s health R&D.
• Demonstrate effectiveness of investments in women’s health R&D.

The ultimate goal is to kickstart work to address gaps in women’s health R&D.