Gates Foundation’s Call for Proposals on Affordable, Accessible, and Appealing: The Next Generation of Nutrition (Round 21)

Deadline: 2 May 2018

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is inviting applicants for the 21^st round of the Grand Challenges Exploration on the topic “Affordable, Accessible, and Appealing: The Next Generation of Nutrition”.

They desire to advance innovative technologies to enhance the availability and accessibility of affordable, nutritious foods for low-income consumers, working within the key constraint that these innovations must be relevant to market-based food systems in low and middle-income countries. Overall, the target population is young women, mothers, and children from 6-23 months of age. Accordingly, the proposed technologies funded must not undermine exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life.

Grant Information

Awards of $100,000 USD are made in Phase I.
Phase I awardees have one opportunity to apply for a follow-on Phase II award of up to $1,000,000 USD.

Eligibility Criteria

GCE is open to both foreign and domestic organizations, including non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions.
This call is open to all respondents, and also particularly encourages proposals from the private sector and/or entities that have partnerships with the private sector – to ensure a pathway to commercialization at scale.
The first principle is to leverage existing innovation within the food and beverage industry and its suppliers for new applications that can reach low-income consumers, for greatest scale and impact.
They also welcome technologies and translational approaches based on knowledge from ancillary fields, e.g., veterinary science, pharmaceuticals, etc. Proposals should address one of the following five innovation areas:
- Unlock investment in novel research in ingredient science for low-cost nutrition
- Enable nutritious product formulation and development
- Reduce cost of sourcing/processing/packaging nutritious products
- Improve reach of affordable distribution & retail channels to close “last mile” challenges
- Leverage marketing, ICT, and other methods to stimulate behavior change and drive regular consumption