Deadline: 28-Oct-22
The Elton John AIDS Foundation is seeking pilot project proposals to measurably and meaningfully engage, educate and link Very Young Adolescents (VYAs) aged 10 – 14 to Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Information and Services.
Thematic Area
Accepted proposals should address one or more of the following themes:
- Improving adolescent’s Sexual and Reproductive Health long–term knowledge and behaviours, empowering them to make informed choices around their health and wellbeing
- Interventions that strengthen adolescents’ life skills (including puberty knowledge, menstruation care, safe sexual practices, relationship dynamics, intimate partner violence, etc) that allow VYAs the capacity to make informed choices about their health and wellbeing both, within and outside of school settings
- Interventions that address gender inequities.
- Improve SRHR skills of parents, caregivers, and authority figures
- Support parents, caregivers, and authority figures (teachers, coaches, community leaders, etc) to better understand and embrace the SRHR needs of VYAs
- Improve the awareness and approach of caregivers (including healthcare workers) to deliver youth-centric, high quality, non-discriminatory information, and services.
- Address restrictive norms and policies which limit adolescents from realizing optimal SRH
- Engage leaders and community members to create a conducive environment for adolescents to access relevant and accurate information and services
- Work to meaningfully shift policies that restrict adolescents’ access to relevant information and services.
- Generate and document data around the SRH challenges facing VYAs and/or the efficacy of established programming focused on VYAs
- Show existing gaps in SRH programming and delineate out possible solutions.
Duration: The Elton John AIDS Foundation requests appropriately costed budgets for projects with a duration of between 12 to 18 months.
Key Program Components
Priority will be given to proposals that focus on one or more of the areas listed below:
- Integration of Mental Health: The Call will prioritize solutions that integrate mental health screening and responses into the proposed intervention.
- Youth and Adolescents Involvement: The Call will prioritize interventions where the applicant can demonstrate how the solution will respond to VYA’s ever-changing needs and incorporate these promptly. Additionally, demonstrate the involvement of adolescents and young people in the design, implementation, and monitoring of the proposed solution.
- Innovative or advancing new solutions: The Call will prioritize solutions with a strong working hypothesis that will achieve outsized impact for VYAs, this can mean de novo approaches where relevant or building on existing approaches and applying them in new ways.
- Inclusive Solutions: The Call will prioritize solutions that include young key populations (LGBTQ+, People who use drugs and young sex workers) including adolescents with disabilities.
- Clear theory of change: The Call will prioritize organizations that clearly describe how and why the approach will bring about the anticipated outcomes/impact cited within the proposed context.
- Scalable and sustainable solutions: The Call will prioritize solutions that can be replicated in country and in other geographies. The proposed solutions should also demonstrate how the benefits of the program will outlast the life of the grant.
Desired Outcomes and Performance
- Successful applications will be rooted in the local context and will propose integrated and targeted approaches which increase access to sexual and reproductive health information and services for very young adolescents. When designing your program, it is critical to identify and understand the nature and challenges that hinder very young adolescents from realizing their sexual and reproductive health rights.
- Please note the outcomes listed below are examples and are not exhaustive of all possible approaches.
- Leverage or develop technology to innovatively respond to the barriers and challenges faced by very young adolescents in accessing sexual and reproductive health information and services.
- Strengthen the involvement of parents, gatekeepers, and the media on the need to create an enabling environment for very young adolescents to realize their SRH.
- Help change and challenge harmful attitudes and behaviours and/or restrictive policies that hinder very young adolescents from accessing SRH information and services.
- Strengthen VYAs’ SRH knowledge and life skills to improve adolescent competence to make reproductive health choices.
Utilise data and evidence to introduce or advance more supportive policies that support access to SRH information and services by very young adolescents. In developing proposed solutions, applications must look at the following:
- Has a clear need been identified, and is it supported by data and evidence? The Foundation is not looking to support business-as-usual approaches but rather innovative and evidence-based (or strong hypothesis-based) models that have a high potential for impact.
- Is there a clear and considered strategy to increase adolescents’ access to SRHR information and/or services?
- Has the organization clearly demonstrated why the project location, activities, communities, and project focus have been selected?
- Has the applicant demonstrated why their approach is the most effective way of addressing the problems/issues identified?
- Has the applicant highlighted why this new approach is needed and why it will be successful?
Eligibility Criteria
Implementation Location: Interventions must be implemented in at least one of the following countries:
- Africa: Angola, Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
- Asia: Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Vietnam.
- The United States: States in the US South
- Funding: The project must be appropriately costed.
- Type of Applicant: Open to any not-for-profit organizations. Consortiums are also encouraged to apply. Ineligible entities include individuals and governments. No organization may financially profit from the implementation of project activities. Profit is defined as any amount over allowable direct and indirect costs.
- Registration and Bank Account: The applicant must be a registered entity and must have an active organizational bank account.
- Completeness and Language: All Application information and supporting documentation must be submitted in English; they are unfortunately unable to process any proposals submitted in any other language. Online submissions must be completed in full to be considered eligible for review; incomplete submissions will be considered ineligible. Applicants must be ‘submitted’ on the Foundation’s online system to be considered.
- Eligible Costs: The Foundation is open to supporting all costs that are justified in relation to achieving project goals. However, grant funds cannot be used to purchase or procure essential medicines (e.g., antiretroviral therapy) or to pay government employee salaries.
- History of Performance: Applicants must have a history of delivering promised outcomes, especially projects focusing on sexual and reproductive health, and have relevant experience/expertise.
Ineligible
The Foundation will not support the following (this is not an extensive list):
- Not a registered not-for-profit or charitable organization. Please note the Foundation does not provide funding, sponsorship, or loans to individuals and governments.
- Organisations that do not have operational Child Safeguarding policies.
- Organisations not implementing in the low- and medium-income countries.
- Proposals that do not focus on the age group 10 – 14 years age group.
- Inappropriate and/or unrealistic proposal goals and outcomes.
- Results solely focused on inputs and outputs, as opposed to outcomes.
- Extensions of existing projects unrelated to the Foundation’s funding priorities.
- A lack of meaningful involvement of adolescents and young people.
- Budgets with insufficient detail or which did not seem to relate to the activities that were set out in the project.
- Organisation/project team does not understand the local context where the program would be based.
- Proposals that do not sufficiently detail the pathway to impact or theory of change of the project.
For more information, visit https://www.eltonjohnaidsfoundation.org/funding/