Deadline: August 21, 2022
Applications are invited for the UNFPA Early & Unintended Pregnancy Hacklab 2022. The UNFPA East and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO) Early and Unintended Pregnancy HackLab will source innovative solutions to accelerate collective efforts to end Early and Unintended Pregnancy across the ESA region.
The goal of this Hacklab is to create a world where communities, including women and girls are supported and lead the campaign against early and unintended pregnancy. The HackLab will engage youth innovators, COs and an incubation partner to scale innovation solutions to end Early Pregnancy in East and Southern Africa.
Opportunity Areas for Innovative Solutions
They welcome ideas and solutions in the following areas:
Policy and Advocacy
- Improved data and information sharing and management between stakeholders mandated to protect girls – these can include law enforcement, health service providers, education providers, religious and community systems among others.
- Create awareness about existing policies that protect the rights of pregnant girls to access services including education and other reproductive health services
- Identify common areas among various existing laws and policies
- Harmonization of traditional laws and policies and national laws and policies on EUP
- Innovative financing/funding models to support agencies mandated to protect women and girls from EUP
Information and Services
- Innovations solving the missed opportunity between the education and health sector
- Addressing the drivers of EUP through multisectoral innovative opportunities
- Ensuring condoms and other contraception is readily available to young people
- Out of school comprehensive sexual education that builds in significant skills for young people to negotiate protected sex
Award
- Each of the two emerging solutions will benefit from a seed fund investment of USD$10,000.
- Another $10,000 in kind investment readiness business support will be provided by identified business coaches. The acceleration support provided by Afrilabs will include business support services including exposure to investment opportunities, business coaching, customer acquisition, brand positioning and awareness etc.
Eligibility
- Ideas must be new, innovative and respond to any of the opportunity areas identified above.
- Be based in an UNFPA SYP Programme country (Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe);
- Solutions must have been tested previously on a small scale and be at the stage to be scaled up;
- Demonstrate capacity with a clear plan for incubating the solution to scale;
- Innovations can be submitted by individuals, teams of individuals, non-governmental organizations (NGO) or companies;
- Priority will be given to solutions from innovators under the age of 35 or from youth-led organizations or companies;
- Align with the UNFPAs transformative results and/core mandate;
- Align with the UN principles of innovation;
- Be scalable and potentially commercially viable solutions. Solutions that are adaptable to other contexts with little financial inject required;
- Have a demonstrable capacity to empower women and youth;
- Teams must be willing to adjust their solution if advised by their Country Office facilitating their technical capacity building;
- Willingness to showcase their solutions through communication platforms to be determined by UNFPA.
Evaluation Criteria
- Relevance and alignment of solution: (max. 25 points)
- Novelty of project and desired stage of development: (max. 25 points)
- Sustainability and scalability (max. 25 points)
- Project budget (max. 25 points)
- Alignment with Country Programme Document (CPD) (max. 25 points)
Application
For more information, visit UNFPA.
