Funding Decisions

Project Title: Byuka Bakobwa (Wake up Girls!)

Testing country: Rwanda

Testing period: 14 months

Amount: $235,000

L’AMIE will be testing an innovative solution which aims to foster more equitable access for young girls who have been victims of gender-based violence (GBV) to non-traditional professional training, by providing a safe and empowering environment. To achieve this, they will receive financial support for the training, as well as for their basic needs (child support, health care). They will be accompanied by women mentors who work in the same areas and they will receive psychosocial support for the prevention of GBV, including training on sexual and reproductive health. After their training, the girls will be set up in cooperatives. Activities will also be organized with targeted groups (employers, male counterparts) to raise awareness in the community about the participation of girls in non-traditional training and jobs. 

Project Title: Holistic Gender-Based Violence Prevention & Response

Testing Country: Guatemala

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $244,702

Canadian Humanitarian, and its local Guatemalan partner, Asociación SERniña/REALgirl, will test
the impact and effectiveness of a holistic, family-centered, gender equity focused violence prevention and response program in Guatemala, as a way of reducing rates of sexual and domestic violence in Guatemala and improving recovery for survivors of violence. Their innovative, ‘Holistic 3-Pronged Approach’ includes: Family Trauma Healing and Empowerment Sessions, Community Violence Prevention Education and Comprehensive Violence Response Programs for Victims of Abuse. Key innovations of the H3P Approach include incorporating Mayan restorative justice methodologies, offering a healing-focused approach to violence prevention and response, and engaging whole families and boys and men throughout the process.

Project Title: Mobile technology: Mentoring and professional learning communities for women teachers in The Gambia

Testing Country: The Gambia

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $243,000

The Canadian Teachers’ Federation will work in partnership with The Gambia Teachers’ Union to test a technological solution that aims to equip and empower women teachers in The Gambia in order to retain them in the teaching profession. Selected women teachers will receive mobiles phones, tools which will enable mentorship relationships and facilitate learning through virtual professional learning communities. This solution would also ensure that more girls and young women in school have teachers (and therefore role models) who are women.

Project Title: Creating Safe Spaces for Learning: My Body, My Health, and My Future (M3 virtual platform)

Testing Country: Honduras

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

The Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST) and Pure Water for the World
Honduras will be testing an interactive learning platform to increase knowledge, shift attitudes and change behaviours around menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) in Trojes, Honduras. By delivering MHH programming that is not confined to traditional classroom settings, this virtual platform will put information and tools about MHH directly in the hands of students and other key community members in ways that are engaging and fun, making an otherwise uncomfortable topic accessible.

Project Title: Building Bridges for Prevention: Women and Security Actors Prevent Child Recruitment and Use in South Sudan

Testing Country: South Sudan

Testing period: 11 months

Amount: $249,045

The Dallaire Institute for Children, Peace and Security at Dalhousie University will be testing a comprehensive prevention program to protect children from being recruited and used as soldiers, with a focus on conflict related sexual violence in Juba, Central Equatoria State, South Sudan. the Dallaire Institute will mobilize local police forces and women leaders from civil society organizations to work collectively to prevent the recruitment of children as soldiers and conflict related sexual violence against children. Round tables between community groups and local security actors, as well gender responsive training for police, will help increase dialogue and coordination between women and local forces leading to strengthened prevention strategies to protect children vulnerable to recruitment and exploitation.

Project Title: Improving resilience to increase nutritional outcomes for women and children in Benin

Testing Country: Benin

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

Lucky Iron Fish Enterprise will be testing new digital tools and other innovations like ‘talking books’ to provide information, and influence behavior and practices to reduce iron deficiency anemia prevalence through their Lucky Iron Fish product. Because of COVID-19, training can no longer be conducted in large group settings or by frontline workers at the household level. The project will promote women’s empowerment to reduce women’s vulnerabilities due to the pandemic and increase women’s decision-making roles in improving household nutrition.

Project Title: Improving maternal, newborn and child health outcomes by using innovative and community-centric approaches

Country: Somalia

Testing period: 13 months

Amount: $239,904

OGOW Health will test a technological solution designed to improve access to high-quality, affordable care for women, new mothers, and newborns in Somalia. The goal is to support rural and urban health facilities in medical records and health promotion by providing needed information to providers and caregivers to make informed decisions. By offering support to women and girls, OGOW’s easy-to-use in the Somali language platform offers a personalized immunization schedule for each family member’s vaccination needs and provides individualized reminders on when and where to go for services; ultimately improving their standard of care, and further building trust between patients and healthcare systems. OGOW will also test a powerful dashboard designed to help administrators and governments to access real-time, consolidated data on various health indicators, leading to more data-driven planning and decision making aimed at achieving their desired health outcomes.

Project Title: Improving WASH for health care facilities and women’s health: Testing the STREAMS approach in Malawi

Testing Country: Malawi

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $240,444

Royal Roads University and its partner Transform International (Canada) will test an innovative solution to improving water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in health care facilities (HFC) in Malawi, specifically for women since they constitute the majority of the HCF users, often for delivery and postpartum recovery. This project will focus on the STREAMS (systems, training, education, and monitoring support) approach by combining WASH best practices and two circuit riders to implement, support and sustain WASH infrastructure and improved behaviours and practices.

Project Title: Equal Access to Justice for Women in Honduras

Testing Country: Honduras

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $243,500

Sombrilla International Development Society will be testing the concept of a “mobile legal clinic” offering legal and support services to local women facing gender-based violence in Honduras. This innovation will seek to empower women and girls in their ability to protect their rights, in particular the right to a life free of violence. This will be accomplished by raising awareness and increasing knowledge with community members on gender-based violence and by offering women and girls improved opportunities to engage with the legal system. Through this innovation, women who are victims of gender violence will have effective mechanisms for access to legal and psychological assistance in order to guarantee their physical and emotional integrity, within a framework of justice and equity.

Project Title: ‘Leaving No One Behind’: Empowering Persons with Albinism, particularly Women and Adolescent Girls in Rural Regions of Sierra Leone

Testing Country: Sierra Leone

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $242,910

The University of the Fraser Valley &​ Albinism Royal Foundation will work on a project to empower
women and girls with albinism, as well as women with children with albinism in Sierra Leone. These women and girls, who experience marginalization, and stigmatization, will be empowered to be leaders, role models, and advocates for the rights of persons with albinism and gender equality. The project focuses on building women’s and girls’ skills in advocacy and leadership, secure livelihoods, and financial literacy. The experiences of these women and their families will also be captured through the use of participatory tools and approaches such as photovoice and digital storytelling. Telling their own stories (including successes and challenges), and sharing them with policymakers, government officials, community leaders, law enforcement bodies, schools, health workers, business leaders, and other NGOs and donors can build a better and a more equitable future for all persons with albinism.

Project Title: Human rights and Indigenous Women Empowerment through Audiovisual Activities in Brazil

Testing Country: Brazil

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $247,280

The Wapikoni Mobile Corporation will test the expansion and adaptation of the “Learn by Creating” methodology to support the strengthening of Indigenous communities in Brazil, and of Indigenous women in particular, in their struggle to defend their rights and their territory. The innovative solution will be tested with a group of young women in Bahia and a mixed group in the Mato Grosso.

Project Title: Adolescent Girl Empowerment through Capacity Building and Water Innovation in Northern Mozambique

Testing Country: Mozambique

Testing period: 8 months

Amount: $150,000

Waterlution and local partner Girl Move Academy will be testing to see how capacity building and water innovation workshops will embolden and empower adolescent girls to design permaculture solutions that address sanitation and water challenges in local school settings in Mozambique, while increasing dignity, safety and attendance of students. Several training methods will be tested in small groups to support knowledge expansion on current water system at the schools, knowledge transfer, community building and practical hands-on learning rooted in permaculture that brings a systems-thinking approach together aligning WASH with local small-scale agriculture.

Project Title: Empowering rural women in Burkina Faso

Testing Country: Burkina Faso

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $221,275

World Neighbours Canada Society will be testing an approach to facilitating an animal-fattening
enterprise which focuses on structuring and supporting the transition to more equitable labour roles and power relations in households, particularly for women but also crucially for men, girls, and boys as they learn from and assist women in a cooperative enterprise. The proposed innovative solution will seek to advance gender equality and empower women by directly addressing patriarchal constraints and by working to improve women’s access to, and control over assets, which can support food security in rural Gourma.

Project Title: Eradicating Child Marriage in Sierra Leone

Testing country: Sierra Leone

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $217,932

CAUSE Canada will test an innovative approach to eradicate child marriage by educating men seeking child brides about the negative consequences of child marriage for them, their families and entire communities. The solution being tested includes training community leaders, empowering advocates, organizing community events against child marriage and collecting data on the number of prevented marriages vs. marriages that took place despite the intervention.

Project Title: Farmer-led Tools, Dashboard Development and the Future of Farming

Testing Country: India & Kenya

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $236,000

Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University will test tools with women farmers to identify capacity building needs, such as accessing new technologies, credit, infrastructure, markets, financial and business planning/management etc. It will also test a farmer-led indicator dashboard and explore the opportunities and impacts of big data and future of farming at the smallholder farmer level in the Nyando Valley (Kenya) and in two districts of Gujarat State in India.

Project Title: Promoting Community-Based Tabletop Simulation Development

Testing Country: Jordan

Testing period: 12 months

Amount: $158,828

Lessons Learned Simulations and Training will be testing workshops which train local humanitarian workers in Amman, Jordan in participatory, gender-aware simulation design. To test the effectiveness of these workshops, they will be followed by a period of coaching and mentoring through the independent design of programmatically relevant simulations. Finally, the implementing team will support local organizations in the delivery of training simulations to their teams or beneficiaries.

Project Title: Women’s Empowerment, Agricultural Innovation, and Climate Change Adaptation

Testing Country: Indonesia

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

Lestari Sustainable Development Consultants will test the women-focused dissemination of newly developed drought-tolerant coffee varieties that will increase climatic resilience. The dissemination will use a gender responsive climate smart coffee farming methodology. The expected impacts of the proposed solution are improved gender equality, increased coffee productivity, more income and food security, and strengthened coffee climatic resilience. The testing will be conducted in the Indonesian coffee producing centres of Toraja and Enrekang districts, South Sulawesi Province.

Project Title: It Takes a Village to Heal

Testing Country: Democratic Republic of Congo

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $224,660

Make Music Matter, in partnership with the Panzi Hospital and Foundation will be testing the expansion of their innovative ‘Healing in Harmony’ music therapy program, which historically focused on helping women and girls survivors of sexual violence recover from their traumas and reintegrate back into the community. This project will now test the inclusion of men and boys within the existing program in order to provide the opportunity to address the trauma from violence and conflict that is pervasive in their lives, and develop nonviolent coping skills, discuss positive models of masculinity, understand gender equality, and learn tools to support and empower their family and community members.

Project Title: Learning Community and Incubator for Gender Equality Projects in Nicaragua

Testing Country: Nicaragua

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $248,975

Mer et Monde will test the development of a local learning community and an incubator for gender equality projects in the department of Carazo in Nicaragua. Capacity building activities coupled with opportunities for practical application in micro-projects will facilitate the transition from theory to practice for the participants. The innovative aspect lies particularly in the methodology chosen (experiential learning) and the collaborative work between six organizations in the Carazo region, for whom this will be a first opportunity to come together to learn, build and experiment under the theme of gender equality.

Project Title: Writing a Path out of Poverty: Testing a Cash Calculator with Extremely Poor Women in Northern Kenya

Country: Kenya

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $189,765

My Oral Village will conduct a field-test in Kenya of ‘4-Share,’ a cash calculator for Android smartphones and tablets. 4-Share translates cash into place value notation, and provides record-keeping templates with no text, only numbers and easily drawn and recalled images to represent statement line items. The goal is to create a safe, motivating solution that allows innumerate women to acquire basic ‘financial numeracy’ and keep their own business records without the help of others.

Project Title: Meshkat Community: Shining a Light on Gender Equality in Jordan

Testing Country: Jordan

Testing period: 12 months

Amount: $222,617

PeaceGeeks will test a new method of peace building in Jordan that centres around women and girls, to develop effective, inspiring and empathic narratives to catalyze a new conversation around norms that limit women’s economic potential and agency in society. The core concept focuses on Jordanian women identifying and creating content but also includes engaging men and boys, who will be trained to see if they can better engage their male peers to rethink narratives that are limiting gender equality.

Project Title: Women’s Empowerment via Menstrual Hygiene and Livelihood Integration

Testing Country: Uganda

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

Women’s Global Health Innovations, in partnership with Village Health Teams (VHTs) will test an innovative menstrual health solution where VHTs from 5 Villages will be trained to promote and earn income selling Bfree menstrual Cups. As opposed to traditional menstrual health products, the Bfree Cup is physically antibacterial, comfortable, easy to clean and reusable for up to 10 years. The core idea to test is whether VHTs can own and drive a solution that improves gender-related outcomes.

Project Title: A platform against violence on women journalists in Sudan

Testing country: Sudan

Testing period: 12 months

Amount: $246,710

Alternatives will develop and test a new digital database designed to improve the safety of women journalists and protect women’s rights in Sudan. By collecting secure data on violence and harassment experienced by women journalists, the online tool will help organizations and the international community better understand gender-based violence in the region and improve prevention and response methods.

Project Title: Girls Groundswell

Testing Country: Guatemala

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $198,574

Canada SOS will test an innovative approach to improving educational performance and retention among rural Mayan youth, especially girls, in Guatemala, using student-driven “learning circles” supported by e-learning technologies. “Learning circles” will be led by trained Indigenous youth (aged 13-21) who will mentor students in grades 4-6 to encourage academic reinforcement and improved educational outcomes.

Project Title: Midwifery Active Digitization Empowerment Initiative for Tanzania

Testing Country: Tanzania

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

CNIS will test the use of digital augmentation to improve and expand the delivery of midwifery curriculum at Tanzania’s Nursing Training Colleges. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of digital learning as a cost-effective alternative to standard classroom training, with the goal of increasing availability of quality care for women at risk of maternal and neonatal mortality in low- and middle-income countries.

Project Title: Remote Ultrasound capacity building for Antenatal Access

Testing Country: Ethiopia

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

In partnership with the University of Saskatchewan, Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief (CPAR) will design and test a capacity building program that will increase access to  obstetrical care in rural Ethiopia by bringing potentially life-saving prenatal ultrasound imaging – and associated diagnostic, preventative and therapeutic capacities-to pregnant women in remote areas of Ethiopia. The goal is to test the delivery of synchronous ultrasound services in selected Health Centers for pregnant women, who are unable to access regular obstetrical antenatal care (ANC) by training health officers, nurses and/or midwives to use synchronous ultrasound technology in consultation with an Obstetrician located in a regional hospital.

Project Title: Technology & Training for Quality and Equality

Testing Country: Nicaragua

Testing period: 14 months

Amount: $250,000

Change for Children will test a new training program and digital resource database for teachers in remote indigenous communities of Nicaragua. The offline, technology-enabled, linguistically and culturally-appropriate MOOC (massive open online course) will be tested to determine its impact on teacher capacity, classroom resources, quality of instruction and gender equality.

Project Title: Inclusive E-Learning for Ugandan Youth

Testing Country: Uganda

Testing period: 12 months

Amount: $213,814

Embrace International Foundation will test a new approach to self-directed e-learning through the use of Mobile Learning Labs, which consist of a portable plug-and-play server RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning) and tablets. The project aims to empower and improve the lives of students in rural Uganda, especially girls and those living with disabilities, by promoting skills development and improving enrolment rates.

Project Title: Kieni Fighters Resource Centre for Women and Girls

Country: Kenya

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $214,945

KIDS Initiative will test a new holistic prevention program, the Kieni Fighter Resource Centre for Women and Girls, that addresses behavioural, biomedical, and structural risks of HIV/AIDS infection for women and girls in Kenya. The project, which includes training to promote alternative livelihood opportunities and incentives to increase educational completion rates, is designed to reduce exposure to the root causes of the feminization of HIV/AIDS.

Project Title: Increasing poultry production in Zambia

Testing Country: Zambia

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $249,030

OVO will test the distribution of solar chicken egg incubators with related training as a means to help farmers in Zambia raise more chickens, diversify their incomes and improve their overall livelihoods.

Project Title: Preventing Cervical Cancer in India through Self-sampling (PCCIS)

Testing Country: India

Testing period: 15 months

Amount: $250,000

Ryerson will test the introduction of a self-sampling method, supported by a sexual health literacy intervention, to increase screening for Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer among rural women in India. The project aims to facilitate timely screening for HPV and help to decrease cervical cancer mortality rates in areas where the Papanicolaou (Pap) test is not easily accessible to women.