Deadline: August 5, 2020
Applications are open for the USAID’s Resilient, Inclusive, & Sustainable Environments (RISE) Challenge 2020. The Challenge aims to identify and fund the innovative application of promising or proven interventions that prevent and respond to gender-based violence across programs that address the access, use, control, and management of natural resource.
About the Challenge
Responding to GBV can provide opportunities for both enhanced environmental action and women’s empowerment, but tackling one issue without addressing the other is unlikely to succeed. USAID’s RISE Challenge aims to identify and implement interventions to reduce GBV in environmental programming.
This challenge aims to fund organizations to innovatively adapt and implement promising or proven practices that have been used to effectively prevent and respond to GBV in other sectors to environmental programming. The challenge will draw insights from other development and humanitarian sectors that have proven or promising practices to address GBV. It incentivizes partnerships between environmental organizations, local communities, indigenous peoples organizations, and gender and GBV experts who can help bridge knowledge gaps and work to build an evidence base of effective GBV interventions.
They also aim to celebrate and spur a broad range of interventions that are sustainable and integrable into USAID and partners’ environmental programming and investments.
Benefits
- For winners of this challenge, USAID will feature their interventions, facilitate access to funding and networking opportunities, and provide technical assistance to support the proposed activity in achieving measurable results and impact.
- USAID will award up to three Fixed Amount Awards (FAA) between $100,000 and $300,000, subject to the availability of funding. Each FAA will be funded based on milestones and an implementation plan that are mutually agreed upon. Grant-funded activities must be completed within one to two years.
Eligibility
- RISE is open to all organizations regardless of type (e.g. NGO; for profit; not-for-profit; national, regional, community and indigenous peoples organizations; universities; foundations; faith-based organizations; women-owned/women-led enterprises).
- All organizations regardless of size are eligible to apply.
- Applicants must demonstrate a partnership model that leverages the capacity, expertise, and existing relationships across relevant environmental sector organizations, gender and GBV organizations, indigenous peoples organizations, relevant experts, and local communities for the geography and sector of interest. Partnerships with research, academic, or evaluation organizations with the capacity to support evidence collection are also highly encouraged. The RISE Challenge requires supporting documentation to verify partnerships.
- All applicants must use the funds to implement interventions in geographies where USAID is currently operational. Applicants must either already have a presence in that country or must have a local partner.
- All applicants need to describe a clear and actionable plan for Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning that articulates how the applicant will test hypotheses, generate evidence, and use learning to adapt programming, which will feed into the evidence base that USAID is creating.
- Applicants should present interventions that address the objectives of the Program Statement.
- Applicants must submit their entries in English.
Evaluation Criteria
- Problem statement, project description, and hypothesis: Applicants will be judged on their articulation of the problem and how the intervention will address the problem through the prevention or response to GBV in environmental programming.
- Contextual awareness, human-centered, and sensitivity: Applicants should describe and demonstrate an awareness of the local context in which their intervention operates, how they intend to meet their target population where they are at, and the measures in place to protect and collect sensitive information.
- Partnership plan and organizational capacity: Applicants will be judged on the degree to which their partnership model demonstrates the ability to leverage the diversity of expertise required for successfully implementing interventions that address the intersection of GBV and the environment.
- Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL): Given the nascency of the evidence base at this nexus, applicants will be judged on how their proposal will advance the international community’s understanding of challenges and potential interventions at the intersection of GBV and environmental programming.
- Pathway to integration: Applicants should demonstrate a plan for understanding how this intervention can be applied in new contexts beyond the initial application.
Application
The documents required for your application can be found here.
For more information, visit RISE Challenge.
