Deadline: July 31, 2023
The Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health (SESH) 2023 Global Call for Game-changers is ongoing. The Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health (SESH) invites young people to find new ways to promote adolescent health and well-being in communities most affected by HIV.
The Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health encourages submissions that think beyond medical or mental health. While these are important, they also want to hear ideas and innovations that focus on the complex web of factors that predict well-being more broadly. One way to think about this is to consider all the things that are important for adolescents and young people to feel healthier, stronger, safer and more positive about their overall lives and their futures.
Although they welcome the opportunity to see all ideas submitted, those with the greatest chance of being selected for further review and possible prizes are those that are ‘actionable’. This means that there are steps and actions that can be taken now (or soon) toward moving the idea or ideas forward.
For this open call, they seek actionable solutions that address the two challenge questions:
- How might we totally and fundamentally reimagine organizing our healthcare systems and societies to support adolescent health and well-being in countries that have a high burden of HIV?
- How might we develop solutions that can support and strengthen adolescent health and well-being in the future, taking into account current and possible threats such as conflict and pandemics and current trends like climate change, rising inequality, migration, urbanization and digitalization?
Categories
- Digital and social innovations for health
- Digital and social innovations that promote adolescent-centred processes, systems and policies
- Social and behavioural innovations
- You have a chance to be creative with your application
Prizes
- Prizes will be awarded to the Winner and runner-up in each of the four subcategories. The first prize will be $1,500, while the runner-up will receive $500.
- Winners will be invited to present their idea or innovation at the Global Forum for Adolescents.
- All people who submit eligible submissions will be invited to social innovation training workshops on building capacity for social innovation monitoring and evaluation, crowdfunding, and related competencies.
Eligibility
- Anyone is eligible to submit to this open call, but the solutions must focus on adolescent health and well-being in selected countries. These countries include Brazil, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
- Adolescents aged 10–19 years can submit ideas on their own or as part of a team. If you are older than 19 years, you cannot submit on your own, but you are welcome to participate as a member of a team.
- Team submissions are encouraged! Each team must include at least one adolescent who is aged 10–19 years, and the team leader should not be older than 30 years.
- Only one submission is allowed for each subcategory. If submitting as a team, the team leader should submit on behalf of the team.
- Teams can submit ideas to more than one of the four subcategories, but it must be a different idea for each subcategory.
Judging Criteria
Submissions will be judged on a 1–10 scale according to the following five criteria:
- Clear and concise description: This refers to how clearly your idea or innovation has been described. You should try to explain in simple, direct ways (1) the background or reason for the idea or innovation, (2) details of what the innovation or idea is, and (3) how it could impact or improve health.
- Relevance: This refers to whether your innovation or idea aims to address health problems or improve health issues that directly affect adolescents in a given community.
- Novelty: This refers to how new, unusual or unique your idea is. What you propose should be groundbreaking.
- Feasibility, scalability/replicability and sustainability: These terms are related to how your innovation can be designed, developed or used in real-life settings. Feasibility refers to how easy and practical it is to implement your innovation; scalability and replicability refer to how easily your innovation can be introduced to and used effectively in a larger population and in other settings; and sustainability refers to how your innovation can be continued.
- Promotion of equity and fairness: This refers to both the ways in which gender, socioeconomic status, wealth, language, ethnicity, location, identity and other intersecting factors have been acknowledged or addressed in the approach to innovation, or as an outcome of the innovation itself.
Submission Format
There is no required structure for an entry, regardless of whether you choose a written submission of 500 words maximum or a 3-minute video/audio description. However, here are some questions that your submission could address:
- How might you describe your idea or innovation in one or two sentences?
- What problem or problems is your idea or innovation addressing? Reflect on gaps that may exist.
- What are some outcomes that you hope to achieve with your idea or innovation? Who do you think will benefit, and how?
- Who or what do you think will need to be involved to ensure your idea or innovation moves forward? (For example governments, the private sector, communities, civil society, research organizations, etc.) Who or what should take the lead?
- What existing resources and opportunities – in your country or region, for example – could be used to develop and use your idea or innovation?
- Do see you any possible problems or challenges with the development or use of your idea or innovation? If yes, what are they and how might they be overcome?
- How might your solution harness or leverage the advancements in science and technology that are underway or anticipated in the coming decades?
- How might your solution help us adapt to key global threats in our shared future – for example, the impacts of climate change, rapid population growth in certain parts of the world (especially India and Africa), economic uncertainty, pandemics, etc.?
- What will be relevant to adolescents in 2030 in all or many of the countries prioritized in this challenge?
Application
If you have more than one entry, each should be submitted separately. You have a maximum of 500 words (written submission) or 3 minutes (video/audio submission) to describe your innovation or idea and there are two ways to submit:
- Method 1: Online form submission
- You can submit your idea or ideas through this Online form.
- Your entry can be submitted as a single Word or text processing file – or video/audio file, if you choose that option – via our online submission form as an attachment.
- Method 2: Email submission
- Download your offline form (You can find other versions of the offline submission form in other languages)
- Send your filled submission form directly via this email: [email protected].
For more information, visit SESH Global.
