When can small grants give big value?

Small, flexible grants for experimentation, learning, and capacity strengthening can provide spillover effects and longer-term value. With recent aid cuts reshaping a smaller humanitarian system pushed to do more with less, certain conditions can determine that the effects of small grants are sustained. The benefit of small grants lies less in the immediate output than in spillover effects: improved joint analysis and planning, clearer coordination, stronger relationships, and — in the strongest cases — uptake into systems that shape how risks are understood and acted on. In the changing landscape of global development, small, flexible grants could be a casualty caught in the crossfire of prioritization and greater pressure to demonstrate value. Evidence from an impact assessment of small grants awarded by Start Network, a network of local, national, and international humanitarian organizations across the world, shows that while these grants will not make up for gaps in funding and are not a substitute for broader changes needed for the system to become proactive and locally led, they can be catalytic, complementing larger funding mechanisms by enabling innovation where conventional finance is too slow or risk-averse. But these effects are not automatic. They depend on aligned follow-on support, institutional buy-in, and a credible pathway to operationalization. Without this, promising outputs often remain pilots or standalone products rather than being embedded in practice. So, what are the spillover effects small grants can generate under constraint, and what are the conditions that determine whether those effects are sustained? By assessing the impact of smaller learning and risk analysis grants awarded to Start Network members — ranging from £12,000 to £40,000 — we identified five ways that “a little” has plausibly gone a long way, and why. 1. Capacity strengthening A consistent benefit of learning grants is that their most consequential effects are often deferred. While the immediate deliverables tend to be assessments and training, the wider value lies in strengthened readiness that can be mobilized during subsequent crises. In Sierra Leone, Humanity & Inclusion, or HI, used a learning grant to conduct an emergency mental health and psychosocial support, or MHPSS, capacity assessment and deliver training for key partners, including staff from the National Disaster Management Authority and Freetown City Council. The initiative strengthened the integration of MHPSS with physical and functional rehabilitation and improved collaboration between HI’s rehabilitation and MHPSS partners. Its value was later evident during the 2023 Susan’s Bay flooding, when trained responders provided psychosocial support to affected communities. 2. Influencing wider practice through institutionalization One of the clearest signs that a small grant has lasting value is when the lessons become part of business as usual. In practice, this occurs when the grant creates the conditions for adoption — by engaging decision-makers, aligning with existing governance arrangements, and translating findings into concrete commitments. For example, revised processes, or agreed policy frameworks and commitments. This cyclone tool in Madagascar illustrates institutionalization in practice. Developed in partnership through a Start Network grant, it was sustained beyond the initial deliverable, iterated over time, and ultimately adapted and scaled into a larger funding mechanism that enables funding to be rapidly released when needed most. This integration linked the tool to dedicated financing, strengthened contingency planning, and deeper engagement with government counterparts — supporting more proactive management of recurrent cyclone risk. 3. Strengthened coordination, collaboration, and partnerships In several cases, the most durable gains are in coordination and partnership development. In Colombia, a learning grant enabled a consortium led by Cadena and with partners including HelpAge International, Convite, and Icare to establish a sustained collaboration with a local hospital to address barriers to health care access for displaced and host communities. Rather than creating a parallel NGO-run service, the consortium worked through the hospital, strengthening referral pathways and supporting service-delivery adjustments such as telemedicine to address specialist shortages. The partnership also generated longer-term institutional links, including university-hospital engagement, and helped secure follow-on funding — including from the government of Colombia and other donors — supporting continuation beyond the grant period. The added value in small grants can also lie in the coordination and partnerships generated through the process. For example, in Nepal, CARE’s use of a small grant addressed a clear gap: heat waves and cold waves were poorly specified in national disaster frameworks, with no agreed definitions or thresholds. The process of developing a better tool to address this sustained discussion between the key stakeholders, including the country’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority and its health ministry. This helped advance agreement on how extreme temperature risks should be defined within Nepal’s disaster preparedness framework and legitimized the need for agreed definitions. 4. Leveraging additional funding Small grants are sometimes used as proof-of-concept to unlock larger financing. In Iraq, Action Against Hunger developed a risk analysis tool to predict water scarcity and its impacts over the next 12 months. The tool later attracted a $2 million grant from the USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance to refine, expand, and integrate the tool into a dashboard. This increased usability and potential expansion — however, bureaucratic restrictions on government data sharing limited the tool’s ability to scale across Iraq, underscoring how funding alone is not always sufficient. This example illustrates how access to further funding cannot, on its own, remove governance barriers. In India, SEEDS reported that the credibility and authenticated data associated with its grant-funded cyclone tool strengthened donor engagement, including by enabling earlier sharing of technical information when there is a forecast of an impending crisis, though it hasn’t yet directly unlocked larger funding. Operationally, it has enabled SEEDS and local partners to identify vulnerable communities with greater precision, saving lives through targeted evacuations ahead of landfall, moving communities to safety. 5. Shifting practice toward more proactive action Small grants can also support a shift from reactive response toward more proactive, risk-informed action. In Colombia’s La Guajira region, HelpAge International used a small grant to fund a 2023 situation analysis on sustainable, community-led options for safe water access and stronger local management of water systems. Informed by the analysis, HelpAge shifted away from costly temporary measures such as water trucking to rehabilitating existing sources and strengthening local capacity to maintain them. Five wells were repaired, and local water committees — embedded within Indigenous leadership structures — now carry out the maintenance, purification, and basic resource management. The national government later committed to rehabilitating over 100 additional wells, drawing on lessons generated through the grant-funded work. Under what conditions can a little go a long way? Taken together, these examples suggest that small grants can generate meaningful long-term impacts, but they are most catalytic where there is a credible pathway from output to uptake, namely: 1. Institutional buy-in from groups able to adopt and operationalize the work 2. Follow-on support to iterate, adapt, and embed it 3. A near-term operational window in which the output can be tested and used in practice Where these conditions are only partially present, impacts may still accrue, but they tend to be slower, more diffuse, or dependent on informal champions rather than durable institutional change. Conversely, without a plausible route to adoption and application, small grants risk reinforcing “projectization” — where activities, resources, and funding become focused around time-bound projects rather than supporting sustainability and wider adoption. These considerations need to be built into grant design and selection from the outset, with explicit attention to uptake pathways, resourcing for iteration, and opportunities for operationalization. So, can you really do a lot with a little? Yes, but only when small grants are designed for uptake, not outputs. Many long-standing challenges — short-termism, projectization, fragmented interventions — will not be solved simply by doing the same work in smaller packages. That said, when small grants are complementary to other sources of funding, they can have catalytic effects that extend well beyond the grant. Across the review, the strongest contributions were realized through spillover effects: strengthened operational readiness, improved coordination, leveraging of additional funding, and, in some cases, uptake into organizational ways of working, alongside shifts toward more proactive action.