Can small-scale grant schemes make a difference to community mobilisation efforts?

Small-scale grant schemes have been presented as an important mechanism to support community based initiatives in poorly resourced areas, but have had a varied experience across the southern African region. Small grant schemes tend to vary in terms of the size and duration of grant provided, type of activity and form of community supported, and in some cases have been criticized for excluding new or very small community based initiatives.

The experiences of these schemes offer different perspectives on how efficient the schemes are in terms of meeting direct community needs. The first and most obvious advantage of such schemes is that they are flexible and can meet direct community needs - that is, they can be targeted quite effectively. The disadvantage is the need to provide additional capacity to support the small grantees themselves. In most instances grantees may not have the capacity to manage such amounts of money and very little experience of dealing with donors.

Of importance here is the scale and level of flexibility of the scheme itself, which may affect its orientation and mode of operation. There are in fact three broad categories of small granting, each with its own advantages and constraints.

The first is where ‘small-medium’ grant making is provided - generally of a scale between ZAR75000 and ZAR250, 000. Here, the grant is provided to an existing organization or institution that - generally speaking - has the capacity to manage such a grant. This normally means that the grantee has been in existence for more than a year and that they have financial statements that have been produced for the previous year or two. This category tends to exclude groups that are newly formed or more community-based initiatives that are fluid in their institution, and have not been in existence for an extended period of time.

The second category of grant operates in a range between ZAR25, 000 and ZAR75,000, and may be termed “small’. Again these grants tend to be given towards institutions that have formed themselves into legal entities that have financial statements, or at least a proven capacity to manage the funds. Many of these schemes may still require the administrative capacity of the small-medium scale.

The third category is in the form of micro-granting, where the scale of grant tends to be under ZAR25,000, and directed at community-based initiatives that – in the main – may not be in an institutional or legal form as yet. Examples of these particular forms may be grassroots community initiatives to deal with children's rights or home-based care activities.

The experience of each of these schemes is that different levels of capacity and different institutional forms are required in order to support the grantmaking scheme itself. Inevitably across all of the three categories of small grants scheme is there is a need to provide hands-on support to grantees themselves. However, scale matters, and as a general rule “the larger the scale of grant, the less hands-on the scheme needs to be”.

For example, micro-schemes often have to extend advice and support on the most basic level. Micro-schemes also need to provide constant forms of information to support grantees through the application stage, the planning of activities and implementation of the project. Special attention is to be given to the closure procedures in these particular types of scheme, as most of the micro-schemes are not able to provide written reports in the form that larger donors require.

Accessibility of the fund is also a question, especially for micro-granting agencies. A major challenge for these schemes is also sustainability of momentum amongst grantees. Thus a set of questions arise as to the type of project supported, the tools and systems in the granting scheme, and the appropriate levels of capacity and activity by the granting agency.

A key question for many interventions in groups is how well they support local agency. In other words, do they actually provide support for those who are actually making the difference at the local level – as opposed to providing support in the form of generic ”capacity building” activities. Overly bureaucratic or overly systematic grant schemes can tend to cramp the local initiative and innovation that local actors undertake to address local situation and local challenges. Flexible micro-schemes on the other hand have the advantage of providing support to a variety of different activities that may be of shorter duration and may be varied in their focus and character.

Overall, the indications are positive. Small-scale grant schemes offer advantages in being able to support very focused and local initiatives, but require capacity and systems to take on administrative risk and hands-on support. They also need to pay special attention to matching their systems and strategies to the scale of grant provided.

Dave Husy / Executive Director