Grand Challenges

Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. These initiatives use challenges to focus attention and effort on specific problems, and they can be traced back to the mathematician David Hilbert, who over a century ago defined a set of unsolved problems to spark progress in the field of mathematics. In 2003, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched Grand Challenges in Global Health, which came to include multiple funding partners. This initiative focused on 14 major scientific challenges that, if solved, could lead to key advances in preventing, treating, and curing diseases of the developing world. Seeking to engage the world’s most creative minds, Grand Challenges in Global Health awarded 44 grants totaling over $450 million for research projects involving scientists in 33 countries. Funding included an additional supporting project addressing ethical, social, and cultural issues across the initiative.