On Friday the United States Agency for International Development started accepting applications for a $30 million grand challenge calling on innovators to submit ideas to combat Zika and “the disease threats of tomorrow.”
“To get ahead of infectious diseases like Zika, we need to move quickly to find and scale new tools and transformative solutions," USAID Administrator Gayle Smith said in a statement.
The grand challenge is an addendum to the to the USAID Development Innovation Accelerator Broad Agency Announcement for Global Health, and is an example of how the agency is increasingly turning to a contracting technique used elsewhere in the U.S. government to see if the model might work to involve new actors in addressing development challenges.