Call for Proposals: South America Border Health Mini-Grants

TEPHINET and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Global Border Health Team (GBHT) are pleased to announce the opportunity for current Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP) residents in South America to submit proposals for border health mini-grants. These mini-grants, sponsored by TEPHINET with financial and technical support from CDC’s GBHT, will provide FETP residents with the opportunity to conduct a project focused on one or more border health pillars.

The project period will run from March 2023-August 2023 and all project activities should be carried out in this timeframe. Proposals may be submitted by an individual resident or a group of residents (from one or more countries). Projects will be funded up to $5,000 USD, regardless of the number of residents working on the project. TEPHINET will sponsor a cohort of up to five grantees.

Proposals may be submitted in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. Submitted proposals will be scored by GBHT’s Proposal Review Committee on the proposal’s coherency, viability, and thoroughness. If there are a lot of proposals received, the Review Committee will prioritize funding grants across a range of topics, countries, and FETP tiers.

Focus Areas

The border health mini-grant projects should fall under one or more of the following border health pillars: point of entry (POE) capacity building, cross-border collaboration and information sharing, or understanding population mobility patterns.

Public Health Capacity Building at Points of Entry
Within this project lane, FETP residents, in collaboration with country partners and other multisectoral partners, could help strengthen POE public health surveillance and emergency response capacity, in alignment with the International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005). Example projects include assessing POE capacity or training POE staff on responding to public health events at POEs. Projects focusing on POE public health capacity building can help ensure that POEs will be better equipped to detect and respond to travelers with communicable diseases of potential public health concern, thus preventing those diseases from being exported from or imported into the country.
Strengthening Cross-Border Collaboration
Within this project lane, FETP residents could work with their ministry of health colleagues and partners from other agencies to organize national- and/or local-level cross-border meetings with one or more neighboring countries to improve procedures for public health information sharing and strengthen approaches for coordinated preparedness and response activities across administrative borders. Improved cross-border collaboration and communication helps countries better detect and respond to communicable diseases in border regions and among international travelers. It also reduces response time and enables faster control of outbreaks affecting multiple countries, both of which reduce the risk of border closures and interruptions to travel and trade.
Addressing Health Risks Posed by Population Movement
Within this project lane, FETP residents could collect, analyze, and visualize qualitative and geospatial data about population movement into, through, and out of their country. This information can help to identify geographic areas at increased risk of importation or sustained transmission of communicable diseases of public health concern. This mobility data can help inform the design of public health interventions to prevent, detect, and respond to communicable diseases of public health concern.

Alternatively, within this lane, FETP residents could work to incorporate a “travel” variable into national disease surveillance systems. Knowing whether a case or case-contact may have had a travel-related exposure can assist public health authorities to determine if communication and/or collaboration with another country may be needed to respond to a specific public health threat.

For access to tools and examples of GBHT’s work in these border health pillars, please reference GBHT’s website.

Expectations

Selected grantees will be paired with a mentor from CDC’s Global Border Health Team. In addition to their FETP advisor(s), their GBHT mentor will help provide technical assistance and support throughout the course of the project. Selected grantees will be responsible for developing and presenting three presentations throughout the course of their project: an initial project plan, a mid-term progress update, and a final presentation. Selected grantees will also be responsible for uploading weekly updates to a reporting document, and submitting a final report. CDC may offer optional professional development trainings throughout the grant period to build the grantees’ capacity in prioritized border health skills.

How to Apply

Interested residents should submit proposals by 5:00pm EST on Tuesday, December 20.
Proposals should be submitted via email to your FETP Resident Advisor who will then email the proposal to the Global Border Health Team at gbht [at] cdc [dot] gov.

Please refer to the “Proposal Instructions and Template” document found on the right side and at the bottom of this page in order to obtain detailed information on how to submit a proposal. Proposals that do not utilize the provided template will not be accepted.

Proposals must include the following sections:

Title
Executive Summary
Background
Project Goal and Objectives
Methodology
Impact
Implementation Timeline
Budget
References

The entire proposal should be no more than six pages and all work should be original, with any source information cited/referenced appropriately.

Please note: There will be an orientation to border health topics to inform applicants about the types of border health projects that could be funded through this mini-grant. The orientation will take place on Tuesday, December 6th at 1:00 PM EST and will be led by CDC’s Global Border Health Team. Please join using this link:https://cdc.zoomgov.com/j/1606856704?pwd=Q3Fndk1GWlVpaGdqbGYrS29IeEpuUT09

Timeline

Selected grantees will be notified in the middle of February 2023.

Mini-grant project activities will be implemented from March 2023 – August 2023, with final deliverables and reports due to TEPHINET, CDC, and your FETP Resident Advisor in September 2023.