Join the UNFPA Innovations to Empower Women and Girls Challenge (the Challenge) that will support women-centered innovations. It aims to further develop and position to scale innovative solutions that can help disrupt inequalities and advance the empowerment of women and girls in all their diversity.

The Challenge will provide a mentorship scheme to increase the potential/capabilities of the awardees to scale up innovations across developing countries. It will thus create and nurture an ecosystem of innovators, mentors, and key stakeholders who will then, in turn, support the solutions and their sustainability models.

Click: UNESCO-Russia Mendeleev International Prize 2022

Awards

The UNFPA-WIPO-ITU Joint Innovation Challenge awards the proposals that have obtained the top 10 highest scores. The awards will consist of:

1. An invitation to participate in a virtual boot camp to further refine their plans and their milestones in the project design plan

2. Seed funding up to USD 60,000 USD, provided in two tranches

3. Also, mentorship and training support through the end of December 2022.

You might also like: WIN WIN Sustainability Youth Award 2022

Eligibility

1. The Company must be registered as a company/organization in a UNFPA program country.
2. At the time of application, the Company is not under procurement prohibitions derived from the Compendium of United Nations Security Council Sanctions Lists and has not been suspended, debarred, sanctioned, or otherwise identified as ineligible by any UN Organization or the World Bank Group.
3. There should be an implementation of the innovation in the UNFPA program country
4. The proposed innovation should be contributing to one of the following challenges:
   • ending unmet need for family planning
   • ending preventable maternal deaths
   • also, ending gender-based violence and harmful practices
5. The Company must have already tested a prototype, proof of concept, and have a minimum viable product (MVP) that has been piloted and is ready to be positioned to scale. The MVP must belong to the submitting organization.
6. The innovative solution must have a viable pathway to scale and sustainability via the market or public sector
7. There must be either no similar solution to yours, or the proposed solution delivers more development impact per dollar, or is more cost-effective, than other ways of achieving the same objectives. Moreover, there must be evidence to support this claim.
8. In addition, proposals must offer innovative solutions that promote the empowerment of women and girls, focusing on ending unmet needs for family planning, preventable maternal deaths, or gender-based violence.
9. Moreover, priority will for the solutions from women-led enterprises.

Also check out: WFP Innovation Challenge 2022 Cohort II

Timeline

• Submission Deadline: March 31
• Long list the candidates and  invite them to Request for Proposals: April
• Request for Proposals Deadline: May 21
• Shortlist of 20 proposals, live pitch events as well as 10 awardees announcements: June 2022
• Virtual Bootcamp with mentors and awardees: July
• “Position to scale” phase: July 2022-March 2023
• End of Challenge Reporting: March 2023