Challenges, prizes, and hackathons use open competition to incentivize local and global entrepreneurs, academics, civil society, and other passionate problem solvers to address a well-defined problem, pilot and test innovative approaches, and scale the most promising solutions.
Learn more about recent challenges and prizes from USAID.
Eastern Caribbean Business Resilience Challenge
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To increase disaster resilience in the Eastern Caribbean, we want to support ventures, public-private-civil partnerships, or other collaborations or organizations with revenue-generating models to make investments in their businesses and communities in order to scale their economic growth, sustainability, and resilience.
Equitable AI Challenge and Community of Practice: Sourcing Approaches to Advance Gender Equity in AI
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To foster an equitable and inclusive digital ecosystem, more efforts are needed to identify innovative and timely approaches to help decision-makers address gender biases, harms, and inequitable outcomes resulting from AI technology.
Fire Grand Challenge
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Launched on August 8, 2024, the Fire Grand Challenge is an open call for solutions that combines cutting-edge innovation and technology with local expertise to revolutionize our approach with fire management.
Locally-Led Humanitarian Assistance Prize Competition 2024
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The Locally-Led Humanitarian Assistance Prize Competition is an opportunity to recognize innovative approaches to humanitarian assistance by women-led organizations (WLOs) and women’s rights organizations (WROs).
Household Solar Workforce Development Challenge
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The Household Solar Workforce Development Challenge awarded $350,000 in grant funding to support scalable, innovative, third-party training solutions to the off-grid solar home system sector's workforce needs in sub-Saharan Africa.
USAID's Inclusive Health Access Prize
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In 2019, USAID awarded $150,000 in prizes to private organizations with a track record for innovative, privately-led approaches with strong scale-up potential that have helped expand access to affordable, accountable, and reliable health services for poor and vulnerable groups.
Intelligent Forecasting Prize
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With Intelligent Forecasting: A Competition to Model Future Contraceptive Use, USAID seeks to identify and test more accurate methods of predicting future contraceptive use at health service delivery sites.
JuntosEsMejor / BetterTogether Challenge
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The BetterTogether Challenge is a global initiative to crowdsource, fund, and scale innovative solutions to support Venezuelans and host communities across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Mombasa Plastics Prize
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The marine plastic waste issue is caused by multiple issues within the plastics value chain: from the moment a manufacturer decides to create a single-use plastic product; to the moment someone purchases and disposes of this incorrectly; or until an uncollected piece of plastic waste is blown into the ocean.
MujerProspera (WomanProsper) Challenge
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As part of the Biden-Harris Administration's efforts to address the root causes of irregular migration, USAID is sponsoring the MujerProspera (WomanProsper) Challenge, a regional challenge to advance gender equality in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
RISE Challenge
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With support from the RISE grants challenge, four projects across Central America, Central and Eastern Africa and South Asia are addressing gender-based violence in the environment sector.
USAID/Nigeria COVID-19 Food Security Challenge
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Nigeria is facing a food security crisis that is compounded by the COVID-19 global pandemic and its effects on the food value chain in the country. The pandemic has significantly disrupted already fragile value chains across the country, including people’s ability to produce, process, and distribute food.
Water and Energy for Food Asia EDGE Ag-Energy Prize
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WE4F, through its Regional Innovation Hubs, provides financial support, technical assistance, and investment facilitation to water-food, energy-food, and water-energy-food innovations.