The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have launched the Innovations to Empower Women and Girls Challenge to help scale innovative solutions that can help disrupt inequalities and advance the empowerment of women and girls.
The first-ever Joint Innovation Challenge organized by the UNFPA, the Innovations to Empower Women and Girls Challenge is looking for innovative ideas that support female empowerment, maternal health, gender equality, and reproductive rights.
The Challenge will support women-centered innovations, including those that i) provide affordable and sustainable access to essential reproductive health commodities, services, and information, with a focus on hard-to-reach areas and humanitarian settings, and ii) scale-up prevention and response to gender-based violence and harmful practices.
About United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. Our mission is to deliver a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe and every young person's potential is fulfilled.
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Innovations to Empower Women & Girls Challenge
Aim and Benefits of Innovations to Empower Women & Girls Challenge
- The partners will select up to 10 winning proposals from the applying Companies, and provide grants of up to $60,000 per award to position to scale.
- After the selection of awardees, winning Companies will sign a 9-month contract during which the awardees will fully develop and start implementing their plans to transition to scale, and will receive technical assistance in the focus areas, including intellectual property (IP) management and business modeling.
- WIPO will provide IP management support tailored to each of the awardees. This will include lectures, mentorship, and interactive workshops, and will be based on WIPO’s IP diagnostic and IP analytic tools. ITU will provide the Bootcamp for winners, support mentorship, and support scale-up using its ecosystem development, initiatives sustainability, and scale-up frameworks.
Requirements for Innovations to Empower Women & Girls Challenge Qualification
The following criteria will be used in assessing eligibility of proposals submitted for consideration:
- The Company must be registered as a company/organization in a UNFPA programme country.
- At the time of application, the Company, including any JV/Consortium members and any of its individual members, 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.
- The innovation must be implemented in the UNFPA programme country in which the Company is registered in.
- The proposed innovation should be contributing to one of the following challenges: ending unmet need for family planning, ending preventable maternal deaths, or ending gender-based violence and harmful practices (see descriptions here).
- The Company must have already tested a prototype, proof of concept, and have a minimum viable product (MVP) which has been piloted and is ready to be positioned to scale. The MVP must belong to the submitting organization.
- The innovative solution must have a viable pathway to scale and sustainability via the market or public sector (definition as per UN Innovation Toolkit: driving adoption beyond the initial pilot’s target population).
- There must be either no similar solution to the one being proposed, or the proposed solution delivers more development impact per dollar, or is more cost-effective, than other ways of achieving the same objectives. There must be evidence to support this claim.
- Proposals must offer innovative solutions that promote the empowerment of women and girls, focusing on ending unmet need for family planning, preventable maternal deaths, or gender based violence.
In addition to the eligibility criteria, priority will be given to solutions submitted by women-led enterprises. However, this call is open for all social enterprises working on solutions that address issues within the focus areas (ending unmet need for family planning, ending preventable maternal deaths, and ending gender-based violence and harmful practices).
Only one submission per applying Company is permitted. All submissions must be made in the English language only. Applying Companies will be required to submit proof of their legal registration and proof of initial customers using their solution.
Application Deadline
April 15, 2022
How to Apply
Interested and qualified? Go to
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on unfpa.brightidea.com to apply
For more details, visit UNFPA website.
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