Applications are now open for the AI-Enabled Consumer Engagement to Advance Family Planning Request for Proposals (RFP), offering grants of up to US$500,000 for projects that generate practical evidence on how AI-powered conversations can improve contraceptive uptake, informed decision-making, and continuation of family planning services.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming global health, and the Gates Foundation Grand Challenges initiative is now seeking innovative organisations to demonstrate how AI can improve access to family planning information across sub-Saharan Africa.
The initiative represents a major investment in understanding how advances in large language models (LLMs) and conversational AI can help overcome longstanding barriers to reproductive healthcare by providing personalised, multilingual, and accessible information to women and girls across Africa.
About the Grant Opportunity
Despite years of investment in family planning programmes, millions of women across sub-Saharan Africa continue to face significant barriers to accessing accurate, timely, and personalised contraceptive information. Traditional clinic-based counselling often struggles to meet demand, while many existing digital health tools rely on static or one-way messaging that fails to engage users effectively.
The Gates Foundation believes recent developments in artificial intelligence create an opportunity to change this landscape.
Rather than simply delivering automated responses, modern AI systems can engage users through personalised, multi-turn conversations, respond to individual concerns, communicate in local languages, and provide tailored health information at scale.
However, there remains limited evidence on which AI engagement strategies actually improve family planning outcomes.
This Grand Challenges call aims to close that evidence gap.
What the Programme Seeks to Achieve
The funding initiative is designed to answer a central question:
Can AI-enabled direct-to-consumer engagement improve contraceptive uptake, continuation, and informed method choice at scale—and which approaches work best?
Successful projects are expected to generate both practical programme outcomes and valuable research that can inform future investments in AI-enabled reproductive health interventions.
The initiative will support organisations capable of deploying AI-powered consumer engagement tools while rigorously measuring user behaviour, interaction quality, and health outcomes.
Key Objectives
The programme seeks projects that can:
Generate Evidence on Impact
Applicants should demonstrate whether AI-powered engagement can increase:
- Contraceptive uptake
- Continued contraceptive use
- Informed family planning choices
Identify Effective AI Engagement Strategies
Projects should investigate which approaches produce the strongest outcomes, including:
- Personalised messaging
- Adaptive conversations
- Prompt design
- Automated follow-up journeys
- Content strategies
- Conversation quality
Build Shared Knowledge
Applicants are encouraged to develop resources that can benefit the wider global health community, including:
- Conversation quality rubrics
- Interaction taxonomies
- Labelled conversation datasets
- AI safety protocols
- Confidentiality frameworks
- Responsible AI guardrails
Assess Cost and Feasibility
Projects should also evaluate:
- Operational requirements
- Cost-effectiveness
- Scalability
- Comparative advantages over traditional engagement models
Successful applicants may receive:
- Up to US$500,000 per project
- Funding period of up to 12 months
- Indirect costs of up to 15% of the total project budget (subject to Foundation policy)
Budgets should be proportional to the proposed activities and implementation plan.
Who Can Apply?
The opportunity is open globally to:
- Non-profit organisations
- Academic institutions
- Government agencies
- International organisations
- For-profit companies
- Multi-stakeholder partnerships and collaborations
However, organisations classified as individuals for U.S. tax purposes are not eligible.
Priority Countries
Projects should focus on women and girls of reproductive age in sub-Saharan Africa.
Preference will be given to organisations already operating in one or more of the following countries:
- Nigeria
- Ethiopia
- Democratic Republic of Congo
- Tanzania
- Senegal
- Niger
- Kenya
- South Africa
- Zambia
- Côte d’Ivoire
Eligibility Requirements
Competitive applicants should demonstrate:
- An existing women’s health, family planning, or broader consumer health intervention
- An established and active user base or distribution platform
- Existing engagement relationships before applying
- A credible monitoring and evaluation framework
- Experience measuring user outcomes
- Strong local knowledge of the target population
- AI-generated content aligned with WHO or national Ministry of Health guidelines
- Capacity to generate meaningful evidence within the grant period
The Foundation particularly encourages organisations capable of evaluating both how AI conversations influence behaviour and why particular engagement approaches succeed.
What Will Not Be Funded?
The Foundation has identified several activities that fall outside the scope of this challenge.
These include proposals that:
- Measure only engagement metrics such as clicks or messages
- Lack an existing user base
- Focus outside sub-Saharan Africa
- Concentrate solely on research without operational deployment
- Spend the grant period primarily acquiring users or building platforms instead of testing interventions
Webinar for Prospective Applicants
Applicants interested in submitting proposals can participate in an information webinar hosted by the Gates Foundation.
The webinar will provide:
- An overview of the funding opportunity
- Guidance on preparing competitive applications
- Live question-and-answer sessions
- Access to a recording for those unable to attend
Application Deadline
Deadline: 25 August 2026
Applications must be submitted through the Grand Challenges application system in accordance with the published application instructions and supporting documentation.
Why This Opportunity Matters
Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for expanding access to healthcare information in low-resource settings. Yet the field still lacks rigorous evidence demonstrating which AI-enabled engagement models truly improve reproductive health outcomes.
By funding operational deployments alongside robust evaluation, the Gates Foundation aims to establish a stronger evidence base that can guide governments, health systems, development organisations, and technology innovators in responsibly scaling AI for public health.
For organisations already working in women’s health, digital health, AI, behavioural science, or family planning, this challenge offers not only significant financial support but also an opportunity to shape the future of AI-enabled healthcare across Africa.
