Open Call: Interventions to Enhance Epidemic Intelligence, Surveillance, and Outbreak Response

Grand Challenges Senegal is soliciting proposals from innovators working across Africa and African scientists in the diaspora on interventions to enhance epidemic intelligence, surveillance, and outbreak response.

The purpose of Grand Challenges Senegal is to advance the ecosystem for public health innovation in Africa. Grand Challenges Senegal will deploy grant funding to test new ideas led by innovators working in the region and African scientists in the diaspora.

Grand Challenges Senegal was launched by the Government of Senegal in October 2022 with a vision to enable the next set of breakthroughs in discovery and translational life science in West Africa, with seed funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and ELMA Philanthropies.

Grand Challenges initiatives are united by their focus on fostering innovation, directing research to where it will have the most impact, and serving those most in need. Grand Challenges Senegal will be no different and prioritize innovators that:

• integrate across disciplines and converge solutions,

• prioritize Senegal as a setting to exemplify the work but with regional impact and potential for reach, and

• apply the very latest science into an ecosystem that is evolving into a hub for translational impact and production.

Grand Challenges Senegal Principles

The guiding principles of Grand Challenges Senegal are the same as those advanced by Grand Challenges Africa:

• Strategic and well-articulated grand challenges will serve both to focus research efforts and to engage Africa’s best innovators.

• Projects will be selected based on public, transparent calls for proposals seeking the best ideas.

• Funders, investigators, and other stakeholders will actively collaborate and integrate advances to ensure these advances serve those most in need.

• Projects will be selected not only for scientific excellence, but also for their likelihood to achieve the desired impact. They must be milestone-driven and actively managed to that end.

• Projects and investigators will make equitable access commitments to ensure the fruits of their research are available to those most in need.

Funding Information

Up to 8 proposals will be supported with a grant of $50,000 over a period of 18 months. On completion, successful projects will be eligible for assistance with additional resource mobilization, project planning and grant monitoring.

Ineligible Proposals

They will not consider funding for:

• Proposals that do not address one or more of the program areas as defined above

• Proposals that do not include an investigator based in Senegal or led by an ECOWAS national

• Proposals that do not focus on delivering the program in the ECOWAS region

• Proposals that do not include both men and women in the submission

• Proposals that do not advance original work

• Proposals that are submitted from individuals without an institutional partner or affiliation

• Proposals unwilling to align with the Grand Challenges Senegal equitable access policy