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On March 8, International Women’s Day, Grand Challenges Canada features two women Innovators who are helping other women to overcome the struggles and issues they face. Raquel Bernal is a Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá (Colombia). She leads a Transition-to-Scale project under our Saving Brains program, along with a team of experts from different parts of the world that includes Professor Orazio Attanasio from UCL (UK) and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (London), Professor Costas Meghir from Yale University (U.S.), Professor Helen Henningham from Bangor University (UK) and University of the West Indies (Jamaica), and Marta Rubio-Codina…of children between birth and age 5 are living in poor conditions, making them much more vulnerable than their peers residing in urban areas. Their families are significantly poorer and these children exhibit a tremendous development lag. Take language development, for example. It has been shown that young children from rural areas are lagging approximately…Colombian families with children ages birth to 2 can access a public parenting program called FAMI (Family, Women and Infancy). The aim of this program is to promote early childhood development by improving parenting skills in a home setting. FAMI serves socioeconomically vulnerable children with one monthly home visit and one weekly group meeting. Each…attended by the mother of the child. Close to 40% of them are single mothers and/or teenage mothers, whose children run a much higher risk of ending up in a poverty trap if their education process is postponed or discontinued. By working with these mothers, and by promoting self-efficacy, self-esteem, motivation and better knowledge about…

Increasingly, funders of global health research are requiring applicants to not just have a brilliant idea but also show that their great idea can be “scaled.” This is, demonstrate that the small project they are testing now can be applied to, taken up by, and have impact in a larger community. For example, the Saving Lives at Birth consortium requires that potential grantees demonstrate their health innovation to have both a strong likelihood of achieving a substantial impact and…

…blog series tells the story of building the business of Grand Challenges Canada. I say “building the business of Grand Challenges Canada” and not “building Grand Challenges Canada” for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, this is not the story of how the vision and purpose of Grand Challenges Canada was built. This was described more eloquently than I could ever hope to in a book called The Grandest Challenge, which was written by the visionaries of the organization Dr. Peter A Singer and Dr. Abdallah Daar. If you haven’t…valid question and one I will not take personally I assure you. My official title at Grand Challenges Canada was Strategy & Operations Manager and I’ve now been designated as Program Manager – Financial Innovations. I only mention that because my increased exposure to academic presentations has taught me that throwing in an impressive-sounding title will force…

TORONTO, May 11, 2020 – The Indigenous Innovation Initiative, hosted at Grand Challenges Canada is excited to announce the launch of its inaugural program, Advancing Indigenous Gender Equality through Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, on May 11, 2020. The program will provide much-needed seed funding to innovative projects that will promote gender equality in Indigenous communities across Canada. The program recognizes the additional barriers Indigenous women and gender-diverse individuals face when they enter the innovation, business and entrepreneurship…Innovation Initiative is based on the strength and the resiliency of Indigenous communities and the power of Indigenous women and LGBTQ2S leaders. By providing seed funding of up to $250,000 per innovative project, the Government of Canada and our partners will support job creation and advance Indigenous gender equality." said Minister Maryam Monsef, the Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development. This program is supported in part through the Women and Gender Equality Canada Women’s Program. “This launch marks a…projects with the goal of unlocking much-needed capital for these early-stage, high potential innovations.” For more information about the platform and the program, the Indigenous Innovation Initiative invites you to visit its website, indigenousinnovate.org. The Indigenous Innovation Initiative is hosted by Grand Challenges Canada with support from the department of Women and Gender Equality (Canada)…

Marguerite Regan is the Knowledge Exchange officer for the Mental Health Innovation Network (MHIN), concentrating on developing resources and methods to bridge the gap between the stakeholder groups within the global mental health sphere. This blog gives a background and summary of a report produced by the Overseas Development Institute, which characterizes mental health as …The purpose of this report [caption id="attachment_15004" align="alignright" width="565"] The ODI Global Mental Health Report characterizes mental health as a policy issue[/caption] Mental health presents an increasingly significant global health policy challenge. There is a dramatic shortfall of services available to those in need, with the treatment gap estimated at between 76-85% for low- and…is a community of mental health innovators, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, service user advocates and donors from around the world dedicated to sharing innovative resources and ideas to promote mental health and improve the lives of people with mental, neurological and substance use disorders. We encourage you to post your questions and comments about this blog…

…his 83-year-old mother-in-law who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Pak Nurhadi’s wife is the primary caregiver, but he often shares the burden and hardships in caring for a person with dementia. Although capable of recalling long term memories from her youth, Pak Nurhadi’s mother-in-law has difficulty retaining new information. Memory loss, ‘odd’ and often ‘troubling’ behaviour, and frequent incontinence are just a few examples of what Pak Nurhadi and his family have to deal with on a daily basis. Fatigue and mental exhaustion lead to conflict between Pak Nurhadi and his wife. For Pak Nurhadi, controlling his emotions is perhaps…important health issue. Many cases have potentially gone undetected, resulting in a lower quality of life for people with dementia and their families/caregivers. In 2014, with the support of Grand Challenges Canada (funded by the Government of Canada), OnTrackMedia Indonesia (OTMI) & Alzheimer Indonesia (ALZI) launched the “Kickstarting Alzheimer’s Awareness in Indonesia” project. Through this…during September 2014.[/caption] OTMI & ALZI also partnered with Juara Agency, a news media to produce a series of short, animated videos to explain the 10 warning signs and 7 stages of Alzheimer’s, and a tutorial on how to care for a person with dementia. The 10 signs video has been broadcast during talk shows…being formulated to provide guidelines for a combined effort for the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. This will include public awareness campaigns and promotion of healthy lifestyles, ensuring access and information to high-quality services, diagnosis and early detection for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, capacity building for health professionals and…

Leah Nosal When I was invited to join the Grand Challenges Canada team this summer, I happily committed to four months of work as a student researcher with the Point-of-Care Diagnostics program with Rebecca Lackman. In doing so, I also committed to four months of answering, “What is point-of-care diagnostics?” Point-of-care diagnostics is about making diagnostic tools more accessible to patients in low- and middle-income countries. For example, this could mean furnishing rural health care clinics with a diagnostic tool so that patients need not travel as far as the closest hospital to seek…point-of-care test is one that can be administered wherever patients are in need: in any home and under any tree.  Bringing diagnostic tools closer to patients means designing tests that are less dependent on electricity, clean water, stable temperatures and trained personnel. As a result, technological innovation is often required to reform existing tools and…innovators, so too does it recruit its own employees from a variety of disciplines.  For the last four months, I have been surrounded by an astoundingly diverse group comprised of – to name only a few - economists and biologists, psychologists and ethicists. It is strange to remember that before my time here, I was…