Funding Opportunity: Round 1 Wehubit Concept Note Due July 5

@maciej shared a funding opportunity with the Wehubit programme that looks like a great fit for OpenMRS:

“The target group of this call for Proposals are non-profit or public organisations that want to diffuse and scale-up or replicate their own digital innovations linked to the subject of this call for Proposals. Innovation can be found in the proposed digital services or products (smart devices, remote sensing, etc.), as well as in the project design (combining tools in an innovative way, intelligent use of data, etc.)”

The funding available is between 50,000-350,000 Euros. Deadline for the first round concept note is July 5.

There are a couple of key requirements in the proposal guidelines related to applicants and geographic locations that we need to be aware of up front:

“The applicant(s) need to be from one of the countries of the Belgian bilateral development cooperation: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Palestine, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda.”

In order for us to pursue this, we would need to partner with an organization with a registered office in one of these countries. OpenMRS, Inc could not be an applicant or co-applicant, however, we could be listed as a contractor. So one option could be to form a consortium of organizations that work in several of these countries, rather than target a single country.

Some initial ideas about how we can use this funding:

  • scale up the microfrontends, specific modules, or distributions that target countries may want to adopt and scale
  • use a fellowship/mentorship model where the community identifies and engages fellows who mentor local developers/designers on the relevant technologies being scaled up

Other ideas around what we can scale up?

Suggestions about countries we might want to target as well as organizations who could serve as applicants and be a part of a consortium?

I’ve started a Google document with the concept note template that we can populate as we discuss.

@paul @terry @janflowers @hamish @burke @c.antwi @jdick @gschmidt @ssmusoke @wanyee

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We had some discussion of this opportunity during this week’s Operations call. Here are the highlights:

Can we come up with a list of organizations that could be part of a consortium?

  • @hamish knows of a small company doing OpenMRS implementation and support based in Rwanda but working in other countries like Ethiopia. @ball @rubailly ?

  • @wanyee started working with an organization in Tanzania

  • @janflowers highlighted that the OpenMRS meeting is in Mozambique this year. Panaramica is a local organization there that we could reach out to.

  • For Uganda, there is Uganda METS (@ssmusoke?) and the Uganda Cancer group (@johnblack?)

Are the funders interested in the organizational capacity or the technical common good like microfrontends?

  • @janflowers thinks the fellowship idea is a good one to fund here and likes the idea of proposing more of a core developer training in those countries to support the implementations themselves. This really then becomes a south-to-south fellowship with a partnership between countries and OpenMRS
  • The RFP calls for the technical/digital solution, so we would need to include a specific technology, however, we could develop a proposal that also includes capacity development
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We could fund either some of the microfrontend work that would be cross-country implementation relevant, or fund the emerging FHIR-first backend work with development fellowships - both of which allow better ability to contextualize implementation of the core OpenMRS product and increase the ability for robust and scalable interoperability - FHIR APIs, Smart on FHIR apps, bulk data movement with FHIR, etc.

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Hey @jennifer - Have we started a document to contribute to for writing?

So did we find any organization that would be interested in the partnership? This is the main hurdle for this application.

@janflowers, here is the link to the Google document/outline for the concept note.

@maciej, I’ve reached out to the different groups mentioned above and have not yet heard back. @wanyee, do you have any news on Tanzania?

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