XPRIZE

MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of XPRIZE is to clearly articulate a vision of a preferred and positive future across a set of domains, identify a roadmap of breakthroughs needed to get there, and establish the incentive competitions that will focus the resources, talent and technology required to enable those breakthroughs and accelerate that future.

We want to inspire and guide innovators to create breakthroughs enabling a world of abundance -- a world where every man, woman and child can access all the energy, clean drinking water, shelter, education and healthcare they require.

XPRIZE foundation is a nonprofit org whose mission is to bring about "radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity" through incentivized competition. It fosters high-profile competitions to motivate individuals, companies and organizations across all disciplines to develop innovative ideas and technologies that help solve the world's grand challenges.

"We help a global crowd, be they experts or laypeople, old or young, to create the breakthroughs that pull the future forward. Support from Fusenot helps that effort, thank you”

Zenia Tata, Chief Innovation Officer

XPrize

The Gender Initiative, to which the Fusenot Foundation so generously supported, launched a series of competitions to address data gaps in domains such as health, economic opportunity, education, urban design, and more.

The Mental Health Gender Data Challenge, the first prize design emanating from this work, is now complete. The following is the summary of the prize design and attached (click the image) is an overview sheet.

Once again, we are truly grateful to the Fusenot Foundation for its wonderful generosity and support in closing gender data gaps. Together, we can help make the world more equitable for all!

SNAPSHOT

The XPRIZE Mental Health Gender Data Challenge was a 28‐month active competition incentivizing teams to collect and publish high‐quality quantitative and qualitative data that fills gender data gaps in mental health. Through XPRIZE’s Data Collaborative, a global community of researchers and innovators can use the data freely to generate insights that can inform mental health treatment and policy.

Why Close Gender Data Gaps in Mental Health?

An estimated one billion people globally have a mental or substance use disorder; yet, the prevalence of these disorders is poorly understood and not prioritized. Mental health disorders are a leading contributor to the global burden of disease, with depression as the second leading cause of disability globally. As the world copes with the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID19) pandemic, depression and anxiety disorders are becoming more prevalent; in the United States alone, the Census Bureau reports that one in three Americans exhibit symptoms of anxiety and depression. The global failure to prioritize and address treatable mental health disorders, and depression specifically, is expensive. In the United States, the economic cost of depression is over $210 billion each year, according to researchers. Depression may result in lower earning potential, higher unemployment, and increased work disability. Women, no matter where they live or what culture they are from, experience at least a two times higher rate of depression than men. Women subjected to violence experience higher rates of depression and other mental health problems. In 2017, researchers estimated that the prevalence of depression for women was 4.1 percent globally. It is the most common and persistent mental illness in women.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more research into women and depression is needed, because the reasons for women’s greater vulnerability to depression is incompletely understood. Even though depression is a major contributor to the toll that disease takes worldwide, it is not prioritized. When comparable data on depression does exist, it is only available for industrialized nations. The best source of global mental health prevalence data comes from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation’s (IHME) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study. However, these global measures rely on a range of often indirect sources and use imprecise estimates derived from meta‐regression models. Even the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) pay limited attention to mental health – mental health is largely absent from the SDG framework (aside from SDG 3.4.2 on suicide), there is a global lack of focus on and incentive to collect sex and gender disaggregated data in this domain. Because women are more likely to become depressed, and since there is a high comorbidity between depression and other psychiatric disorders, suicide, and substance abuse, sex‐disaggregated mental‐health data are essential.

Viewing depression through a gender lens and understanding the gender differences in depression globally will also help us understand the causes and the entire human experience of depression. Filling the gender and depression data gap will tell us how and why men’s and women’s experience with depression differs and will help us understand how gender norms influence individual “attitudes, behaviors, and power relations” and how these dynamics are core to women’s health outcomes.

In a call to action on the grand challenges in global mental health, breakthroughs around equality and reducing the burden of disease will depend on good data.