Is there an opportunity to scale up successful models for making small grants to communities and NGOs in the global south? Could this be a way to increase the amount of funding that flows to locally led organizations?
Speaking at a Devex Pro Live event, representatives from World Connect and Spark MicroGrants, which make small grants of around $10,000 to villages and communities, and the African Visionary Fund, which makes grants typically of around $150,000 to locally led NGOs, said they believe their model has proved extremely resilient and successful, and can also be readily scaled up so that it is used to distribute hundreds of millions, instead of millions.
Money granted to communities and organizations has allowed grantees to raise substantially greater levels of funding elsewhere, they said and has been measured as having significant impacts on local development.