“What kinds of grants are available from European donors?”
“How can help make our proposals competitive?”
“Where can we learn more?”…
In most of the resource mobilisation trainings I have facilitated, these are among the most common questions I have been asked.
Andrew Pavao is DSW’s Resource Mobilisation Coordinator and lead officer for Euroleverage’s international resource mobilisation portfolio.
Thousands of organisations around the world want to do great work with their programmes, but as non-profits their search for funding is a continuous activity. This challenge is sometimes greater the more grassroots and local you are – those organisations working tirelessly to improve a specific constituency have a greater challenge in responding to international donors and their requirements: the grants can be large, eligibility might be restrictive, and there are so many complicated rules! It might seem like only the large international NGOs ever get the grants. This can be intimidating, and there’s a lot of understandable frustration when the goal seems so relatively simple: improving lives.
Myths and misconceptions aside, even local organisations can in fact access European funding – either as applicants themselves or as partners within a larger consortium.
DSW’s Euroleverage project has been responding to questions like these since 2007. The project has organised a chain of capacity building initiatives on resource mobilisation to benefit CSOs in Africa and Asia over the last seven years, helping to demystify the European donor environment and funding for health and family planning. In the last year alone, we’ve organised five Proposal Clinics, a regional Training-of-Trainers workshop, and offered technical assistance to over 75 CSOs across ten countries. Participants and recipients overwhelmingly evaluate these trainings highly, regarding them as excellent preparation for seeking funding in their countries. We’ll continue this work in the next years to keep apace of expected calls for proposals and other funding opportunities.
Today, we’re pleased to announce the latest tool to complement our international resource mobilisation efforts. Euroresources.org – an online database of European funding programmes – has been released to the public. With profiles of 32 European donors and 50 of their funding programmes, we’ve added an interactive world map to help find the most relevant programmes for a CSO in a given country. This is just another way that we’re trying to help even the smallest NGOs to better understand European donors and the sorts of funding available to them.
