Since 2003, the COMO Foundation has supported non-profit organisations working to improve the lives of women and girls. To date, grants from the foundation to charities and social enterprises have enabled education, skill development and income generation projects.

The COMO Foundation supports fresh approaches to closing the income and opportunity gap for women and girls with significant unmet needs, with a view of strengthening societies as a whole.

 

Working directly with implementing partners, they fund organisations working to address gender inequality by:

 

increasing access to knowledge, information and education, both formal and functional

encouraging income generation and social enterprise

addressing the “bottom of pyramid penalty”, in which underserved communities tend to pay more for basic goods and services.

COMO Foundation supports organisations in four ways:

 

1. Core Support to help partners establish sound organisational frameworks.
2. Institutional Strengthening to invest in partners’ capacity for strategic growth
3. Scaling of successful pilots through the Proof of Concept phase, with a view of collecting solid bodies of data and evidence.
4. Planning to enable partners to develop viable business plans to address their growth, programme evolution and financial sustainability.

 

In line with entrepreneurial roots, their partners are growth-oriented with organisational fundamentals in place. Their operating budgets typically range from USD 150,000 to USD 2 million. All grants are term-limited and all successful proposals have clearly defined graduation strategies from such funding. There are no geographical limitations to the Foundation’s portfolio.