Partnerships

Grand Challenges partnerships support a global community of problem solvers who work together to set an innovation agenda and do the breakthrough science to deliver on it.

Going Farther and Faster Together

Reaching collective goals for global health and development equity requires local innovators solving local problems and championing creative ideas from a global community of problem solvers. Partnership initiatives like Grand Challenges Africa, Grand Challenges India, and Grand Challenges Brazil provide a mechanism to engage local innovators and create opportunities to collaborate within and across initiatives to solve problems for the African continent, for India, for Brazil, and for the world. Inaugural collaborations across these partnership initiatives targeted maternal and child health, data science, and antimicrobial resistance.

Grand Challenges Africa was launched in 2015 by the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Agency as part of the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA) with the support of the Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).  AESA is an agenda-setting and​ funding platform established to address Africa’s health and development challenges, and Grand Challenges Africa is a partnership framework for funders to launch joint challenges open to African investigators.

Grand Challenges India was launched in 2013 as a partnership framework for the Government of India’s Department of Biotechnology, India’s Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and other funders to launch joint challenges open to Indian investigators.

Grand Challenges Brazil was launched in 2012 as a partnership framework for the Brazilian government’s Ministry of Health, its National Council on Research (CNPq), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other funders to launch joint challenges open to Brazilian investigators and to expand collaborations with Portuguese-speaking African countries.

Global Partnerships and Grand Challenges

Grand Challenges partnerships support a network of creative people, anchored around those who champion innovation for impact using their first-hand knowledge of local issues and constraints in the countries most burdened by health and development inequity. Their collective action and directed energy is helping solve today’s key problems in global health and development, while building a mechanism ready to solve tomorrow’s problems.