Opportunities to Advance Women's Health Innovation
This initiative is open to nonprofit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. We particularly encourage applications involving projects led by women or from women-led organizations and applications from institutions based in low- and middle-income countries. Proposals should be aligned to local public health systems. Additionally, collaborations are highly encouraged.
The conventional understanding of women's health - which mainly centers on reproductive and maternal health - must be redefined: the health of women includes the overall health and well-being of women's bodies and minds across their life course, as well as the consideration of sex and gender in all aspects of disease and treatment. When using the term women in the context of ‘women's health' we are also inclusive of both sex as a biological variable and gender as a social variable across the life course (including girls and adolescents) and people assigned female at birth, transgender women, transgender men, and non-binary people.
Tailoring prevention, screening, diagnostics, and treatments for diseases and conditions to account for sex and gender differences, as well as for women's context and environment, is crucial to support their health and well-being. By addressing intersectional and underlying social and structural factors, we can empower women to make informed decisions, pursue their ambitions, and live healthier lives. When women globally have access to appropriate, high-quality care, they can plan their families, increase their households' resilience to shocks, and advance their education. As women frequently serve as family caregivers, healthy mothers contribute to healthier households with better nutrition, improved child development and education, and higher household earnings. Healthy women transform societies.
Women's health is currently an underserved area for innovation, facing disproportionately low R&D funding relative to its burden. As recently as 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) represented nearly 60% of funding for sexual and reproductive health R&D.[1] While stakeholders are beginning to address innovation gaps in women's health, no coordinated agenda across sectors with a global focus exists to align their efforts. The result is less innovation in the women's health space and limited data to support business cases for new products.
To address this need, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health initiated an inclusive, consultative, cross-sector effort to generate a Women's Health Innovation Opportunity Map 2023 as a collaborative framework to advance women's health innovation. The Opportunity Map was created by the Innovation Equity Forum (IEF) - a group of 250 stakeholders in women's health from across sectors and over 50 countries. The aim of the IEF was to bring a broad range of multidisciplinary expertise from various levels and sectors of the biomedical enterprise to provide diverse viewpoints in order to develop an inclusive, globally-focused, and widely accepted Opportunity Map of topics in women's health R&D.
The Opportunity Map has three main components. First, it establishes broad topics of women's health R&D with unique challenges, needs, and goals. Topics fall into two categories -
- Cross-cutting topics include data and modeling, research design and methodologies, regulatory and science policy, innovation introduction, social and structural determinants, and training and careers.
- Issue-specific topics include communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases and chronic conditions, and female-specific conditions.
Second, each topic identifies leading opportunities based on their potential for impact, readiness to scale, innovation feasibility, focus on women's unmet health needs, and ability to improve health equity. Finally, example specific solution strategies articulate actionable ways to realize each opportunity and create impact within the next 15 years. The full Opportunity Map can be found here.
The Challenge
The Women's Health Innovation team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking for innovations and ideas that address opportunities outlined in the Opportunity Map. While not all opportunities in the Opportunity Map are in scope for this RFP (see list below and Table 1), we are looking to fund proposals that address a wide range of issues.
The ultimate goal of this RFP is to kickstart work to address gaps in women's health R&D. 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