Do you have a great idea to tackle water, sanitation and hygiene challenges?

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

19 September 2018-The African Academy of Sciences (The AAS) and partners today announced new funding for technology-based solutions to improve access to water and sanitation.

About 4.5 billion people worldwide lack access to sanitation while as many as one billion people defecate in the open, and an additional three billion use toilets from which the waste is not safely contained or, once emptied, is not safely treated.

The AAS has partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF and ARM Technology to provide the Innovation for water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in urban settings grant, which aims to promote healthy, safe, and productive lives. The grant is funded through The AAS Grand Challenges Africa (GC Africa) programme in partnership with the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). This is the fourth call to be issued under the GC Africa programme in 2018 and the fifth since the launch of the Grand Challenges Africa Innovation Grants in 2016.

Up to $100,000 will be given to each winning project for two years for technologies that improve access to clean drinking water, household sanitation and hygiene, and address urban pollution, and more specifically providing solutions to, among others:

• Integrate hygiene promotion programmes with urban activities (such as marketplaces and schools)
• Fill the data gap on measuring the proportion of waste emptied from pits and septic tanks and taken to treatment
• Establish awareness programming to improve understanding of sanitation-related risks amongst dwellers in low income urban settlements
• Monitor the level of environmental contamination, bacteriological contamination, or service failure across urban contexts and map trends in real-time.

Projects must target individuals, families, communities, urban planners, service providers, or WASH/ food infrastructure, networks, and systems taking into account these users’ needs and social, political, economic, environmental and infrastructural constraints of where the technology will be deployed.

Applicants located in African organisations should apply through The AAS Ishango Online System ISHANGO link while those in the rest of the world should apply through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation portal by Grand Challenges Explorations link.

Learn more about the Innovation for water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in urban settings grant. Read more ...