Overview of Our Programs

Grand Challenges Canada’s Global Mental Health program supports bold ideas to improve treatments and expand access to care for mental disorders, through transformational, aff­ordable and cost-e­ffective innovations that have the potential to be sustainable at scale.

The United States Agency for International Development Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA), the UK Department for International Development (DFID), and Grand Challenges Canada have launched Creating Hope in Conflict: A Humanitarian Grand Challenge. This challenge seeks to fund and accelerate solutions that enable life-saving or life-improving assistance to reach the most vulnerable and hardest-to-reach people in conflict-generated humanitarian crises.

Grand Challenges Canada, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) have joined together to support Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development. Together, we call for groundbreaking prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns in poor, hard-to-reach communities around the time of childbirth.

Saving Brains supports bold ideas to improve early brain and child development globally.  The portfolio focuses on three areas of healthy development (health & nutrition, enrichment and protection) that, when addressed together, set up a child to reach his or her full potential.

The Stars in Global Health program supports Bold Ideas with Big Impact^® from the best and brightest scientists and innovators, both in low- and middle-income countries and in Canada, to address some of the most pressing global health challenges. It provides funding to explore transformative ideas at proof-of-concept that bring together scientific/technical, social and business innovation.

The goal of Grand Challenges Canada’s Transition to Scale program is to support innovators from Canada and from low- and middle-income countries who are positioned to take their bold ideas to big impact in the area of global health. Through the Transition To Scale program, Grand Challenges Canada brokers smart partnerships that mobilize private capital and domestic public resources to generate scalable and sustainable solutions that deliver measurable social impact.