SVRI Grant 2026 – GBV in Higher Education Institutions with a focus on STEM

📝 About the Grant

The Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) is pleased to announce an additional funding envelope as part of the 2025–26 grant cycle, focusing specifically on gender-based violence (GBV) in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), with a particular emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

This funding stream recognizes the unique risks, barriers, and opportunities for addressing GBV in STEM fields within HEIs in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). It is part of SVRI's broader 2025–26 Grant Call, which includes two streams:

• Open Grant: Supporting innovative research that contributes to the prevention and response to violence against women (VAW), violence against children (VAC), and other forms of GBV in LMICs.
• GBV in HEIs (STEM-focused) Grant: A newly added stream dedicated to addressing GBV within Higher Education Institutions, with a targeted focus on STEM fields.

📅 Opportunity Details

• Date Published: July 02, 2025
• Application Deadline: August 11, 2025
• Category: Grants

💰 Benefits

• Grant Value: $40,000 – $100,000
• Duration: 12–24 months

✅ Eligibility Criteria

All proposals should:

• Be led by LMIC-based organisations, universities, or research institutions.
• Build on existing evidence, outlining a clear gap in the field and how the research will strengthen policy, practice, or methodology.
• Address priority evidence gaps, drawing on SVRI’s research agendas, including:
  • Global and regional shared research agendas (Global, LAC, Africa, East Asia Pacific).
  • Topic-specific research agendas (Child Sexual Violence, Technology-Facilitated GBV, GBV in Higher Education Institutions, Intersections between VAW and VAC).
• Demonstrate ethical rigour, including strategies to minimize harm and ensure informed consent.
• Include clear, actionable research uptake and dissemination plans.
• Provide a data management plan detailing data security, access, and storage (if applicable).
• Outline a realistic budget and timeline, with strong justification.

Prioritized Proposals:

• Involve multidisciplinary, cross-sectoral consortia.
• Demonstrate strong local partnerships and institutional buy-in.
• Adopt feminist, intersectional, and rights-based approaches, ensuring safe, ethical, and inclusive engagement of affected communities.
• Provide a clear breakdown of responsibilities for consortium proposals, ensuring equitable partnerships and including an expert in VAW/VAC research.

Welcomed Proposals:

• Strengthen research capacity in LMICs through mentoring, training, and leadership development, with meaningful participation of early-career researchers.
• Test, adapt, or scale innovative approaches to addressing VAW and VAC.
• Build or support networks between researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

🔬 Research Design

SVRI invites a diversity of research designs, including:

• Primary data collection
• Secondary data analysis
• Mixed methods
• Implementation science
• Innovative methodological approaches, where appropriate to the research question

🌍 Focus on GBV in HEIs (STEM-Focused)

Funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), this stream supports research focused on addressing GBV in HEIs with a focus on STEM in LMICs. The goal is to promote evidence-based, gender-responsive policies in national science institutions and workplaces, advancing the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in higher education.

Additional Requirements:

• Show institutional support from participating HEIs.
• Include clear strategies to influence institutional policies and practices (if relevant to the research question).
• Demonstrate multidisciplinary collaboration and alignment with longer-term institutional change goals.
• Apply an intersectional lens throughout the research design and implementation, addressing diverse and overlapping identities (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation).
• Respond to the key research priorities identified through SVRI’s priority-setting exercise on GBV in HEIs.

📅 Application Date and Process

• Language of Application: English, French, and Spanish
• Deadline for GBV in HEI – STEM: August 11, 2025, at 11:59 PM South African Time

Apply here.

📌 Contact Information

For more details, visit the SVRI Grant 2026 webpage.

• Grant Value: $40,000 – $100,000
• Duration: 12–24 months