Responses to Questions

Request for Application:

Notice G0: Software Global Goods

 #2022-044

September 24, 2022

 

The following are the responses of the Digital Square at PATH to questions regarding the Notice G Open Solicitation release on August 29, 2022.

Question 1

A subset of approved global goods will receive travel funding to attend the Innovators meeting. How will the global goods that receive these travel funds be selected from the pool of approved applicants?

Answer 1: The Investment Review Committee (IRC) will review and balance the criteria of the ability to contribute to the Innovators meeting with the “onboarding” of new Global Goods (GG) community members and the focus of “global reach and LMIC focus”.

Question 2

A subset of approved global goods will receive $25,000 in impact funding. What is the criteria for determining how the global goods will be selected?

Answer 2: The IRC will review the applications based on scale and evidence of impact as well as opportunity to showcase effectiveness of GG. The IRC will review the allocation across the areas of GG mappings and types too

Question 3

The eligibility criteria states that the proposed software solutions should focus on Sustainable Development Goal 3: Health-well being and the evaluation criteria states it should be deployed at significant scale. Does the evaluation criteria give more weight to implementations in public health than implementations in a different space even if the good addresses an important public health problem that crosscuts other domains? Cross-cutting solutions that have been deployed in other verticals are sometimes not branded as public health solutions, but address challenges such as data interoperability that are equally relevant to public health. Our solution has been deployed in public health but has also been deployed in other sectors.

Answer 3: There shouldn’t be a different weighting of this answer – what the reviewers don’t want to see is a tool trying to force its function into Public Health – something like GeoPrism is a fair example for a broader tool that could be viewed for a health GG because of its ability to focus in this space as well as the fact that it has been used in other health tools before.

Question 4

Will the evaluators take into consideration implementations that are built on older versions of the solution that have been white labeled as another product?

Answer 4: Yes – please just narrate effectively to highlight this.

Question 5

If to be considered as a Global Goods must the software have all the attributes of a global good, in particular this attribute "Are aligned to the Digital Public Goods (DPG) Standard and are either nominated or registered as DPGs (only relevant to software and content global goods)." The way it is indicated in the RFP (page 2) it does not seem like we should check all the boxes. However, on the application website it is requested we provide " Link to Digital Public Goods Alliance nomination/registration” with mention that it is mandatory

Answer 5: Yes, all Global Goods (Software) must align to the DPG standard. Please let us know if there is a particular aspect of the standard that is a challenge or a concern. We require the nomination or registration as a DPG as part of the process.

Question 6

Do you have information you can share which further defines the scope of each notice?

Answer 6: The overall goal of Notice G is to identify DPGs that meet the definition of global goods – and to best do this we’ve segmented the call to focus around the 3 types of global goods we’ve identified (Software (G0), Content (G1), Service (G2)). The scope of each call will be similar to what you see for G0 and will ask tools to showcase their ability to meet the definition of a global good with the questions focused on the type of gg (i.e. questions more related to content over software etc.).

Question 7

What budget is available for each notice?

Answer 7: The financial awards are listed in the calls and each of the G0, G1, G2 will be evaluated as part of a common pool. This round is not focusing on the provision of core funding for feature development at this time, but successful global goods will form part of the renewed community and be engaged for future funding opportunities.