There may be no realistic way to produce a master list of what countries do / do not have a reasonable chance at funding. For instance, the grantmaker may just not know enough about the country and the possibilities it offers without reading a grant proposal.
What would people think of a presumption that EAIF or other funders in this space should ordinarily offer at least a minimal participation grant for first-time applications filed in good faith coming from low/middle income countries?
By “participation grant” I mean a reasonable amount to compensate for planning and writing of the grant itself. And I might extend “middle income countries” a bit further than the official World Bank definition, at least for partial compensation. The grants could be rather low; at the top of the World Bank definition, the top of the range for MICs is $12,535 GNI per capita, so a week’s worth of time based on that rate would be somewhere around $241. I’m not wedded to a specific way of calculating a participation grant, but this payout report suggests the number of denials is not that large and presumably only a fraction of denials are from LMICs.
The perception that funding is harder to get in LMIC countries may dissaude people from applying in the first place, and getting applications from LMIC countries has value. So the presumption would shift at least some of the costs of producing unsuccessful applications in LMICs from the applicant to the community. It’s not a complete answer, but compensating certain unsuccessful applicants who produce something for community use seems better to me than making them bear all costs.
There may be no realistic way to produce a master list of what countries do / do not have a reasonable chance at funding. For instance, the grantmaker may just not know enough about the country and the possibilities it offers without reading a grant proposal.
What would people think of a presumption that EAIF or other funders in this space should ordinarily offer at least a minimal participation grant for first-time applications filed in good faith coming from low/middle income countries?
By “participation grant” I mean a reasonable amount to compensate for planning and writing of the grant itself. And I might extend “middle income countries” a bit further than the official World Bank definition, at least for partial compensation. The grants could be rather low; at the top of the World Bank definition, the top of the range for MICs is $12,535 GNI per capita, so a week’s worth of time based on that rate would be somewhere around $241. I’m not wedded to a specific way of calculating a participation grant, but this payout report suggests the number of denials is not that large and presumably only a fraction of denials are from LMICs.
The perception that funding is harder to get in LMIC countries may dissaude people from applying in the first place, and getting applications from LMIC countries has value. So the presumption would shift at least some of the costs of producing unsuccessful applications in LMICs from the applicant to the community. It’s not a complete answer, but compensating certain unsuccessful applicants who produce something for community use seems better to me than making them bear all costs.