Across low- and middle-income countries in Africa, 161 million women of reproductive age want to avoid a pregnancy, and roughly 32 million of them have an unmet demand for contraception. Clinic-based counseling has not closed that gap at the scale or cost required, and the first generation of digital health tools mostly delivered one-way SMS blasts that could not answer a follow-up question.
The Opportunity
The Gates Grand Challenge for AI-Enabled Consumer Engagement to Advance Family Planning offers grants of up to $500,000 over 12 months to organizations willing to deploy AI-driven conversational tools and measure whether they actually move contraceptive uptake, method continuation, and informed method choice.
The framing is usefully skeptical.
The RFP states that the field lacks evidence on which approaches work, and it will not fund proposals that lean on engagement metrics, sessions completed, messages sent, users registered, as primary proof of effectiveness.
Grantees must produce shared public goods: labeled conversation examples, quality rubrics, interaction taxonomies, and safety, confidentiality and guardrail protocols. AI-generated content must be grounded in vetted information aligned with national ministry of health or WHO guidance.
Who Can Apply
The call is open globally to nonprofits, for-profit companies, international organizations, government agencies and academic institutions. Multi-stakeholder collaborations are encouraged. But the bar is operational, not conceptual:
- An existing consumer engagement approach with an active, engaged user base in family planning, women’s health, or consumer health more broadly
- That user base or distribution relationship already in place in Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Senegal, Niger, Kenya, South Africa, Zambia or Côte d’Ivoire
- Grant funds spent on deployment, learning and evaluation, not on acquiring users or negotiating platform access. The AI approach itself can be brand new. The distribution cannot be.
Apply Now: Deadline: August 25, 2026
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