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Farm Africa receives Grand Challenges Explorations Grant

22 May 2013

Farm Africa announced today that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Farm Africa’s project will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, titled Supporting Uptake of Time and Energy-Saving Technologies.

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mould in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Farm Africa’s project is one of the Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 grants announced today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

To receive funding, Farm Africa and other Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of four critical global heath and development topic areas that included agriculture development, neglected tropical diseases and communications. Applications for the next Round will be accepted starting September 2013.

The project will work with 300 smallholder women farmers in Ethiopia who grow maize and sorghum to support them to have access to and use technologies such as manual seed drills and sorghum threshers which will save them time and labour. Farm Africa Chief Executive, Nigel Harris said: ‘We are thrilled to receive this grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is central to our work on gender and through using simple technologies will both relieve the burden of heavy labour and increase the productivity and quality of life of rural woman farmers.’

The technologies are not new but women face barriers to using them. Farm Africa’s intervention includes setting up women’s groups to trial equipment, organising local savings groups to finance technologies, supporting groups to maintain tools, empowering women to have a stronger voice in agricultural decisions and working with local government to build the technologies into existing extension services.

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a US$100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 800 people in more than 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of US$100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to US$1 million.

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