The Humanitarian Grand Challenge is looking to fund groundbreaking solutions that are significantly improving the lives of vulnerable people affected by conflict.
The Problem
Today, more than 136 million people around the world live in areas experiencing humanitarian crises. Millions of these people are unreachable by traditional humanitarian aid delivery due to armed conflict. As the length, frequency, and scope of the world’s conflicts increase, it is becoming more difficult to reach affected people in insecure areas with life-saving and life-improving humanitarian assistance. We need new solutions that respond to the needs of vulnerable, inaccessible communities – yet, less than one percent of humanitarian aid is focused on investing in the innovations necessary to reach them.
About the Challenge
The U.S. Agency for International Development, the UK Department for International Development, and Grand Challenges Canada are partnering on Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge. Their goal is to identify solutions that allow communities to respond more nimbly to complex emergencies and take steps to create better lives for themselves.
The Opportunity
Through this first call for innovations, they seek life-saving or life-improving innovations to help the most vulnerable and hardest-to-reach people impacted by humanitarian crises caused by conflict. These innovations will engage the private sector and involve input from affected communities.
There are 4 key focus areas:
- Safe Water and Sanitation: They are looking for bold ideas, technologies, processes and approaches that enable rapid provision of safe water and safe disposal of waste and sewage in the most vulnerable households and/or enable implementers to rapidly scale up programs.
- Energy: They are looking for bold ideas to generate energy. They are particularly interested in alternative energy solutions that are possible to set up and maintain in conflict situations, and that power life-saving and life-improving services such as health, information, water and sanitation, and education.
- Life-Saving Information: They are looking for bold ideas that use and improve access to information and data to increase the impact of humanitarian assistance at the local level as well as enable more effective connections between affected populations and humanitarian actors.
- Health Products and Services: They are looking for bold ideas that enable non-experts to provide quality care; empower skilled staff who choose to work in conflict zones; allow faster or less costly importation and distribution of quality essential health supplies in conflict zones; and enable affected communities to manufacture necessary high quality and safe supplies, or sterilize and reuse them.
Deadline: 12 April
