DM2009 Winners Face More Funding Hurdles

Development Marketplace awards to winners range up to $200,000 -- to cover what is called "early-stage" or seed development of projects.  But after that period -- usually one or two years -- any project, no matter how promising it looks, has to find new funding.

DM2009 juror Tran Triet of Vietnam, a DM2003 winner, talked about projects that seek to transform a community both environmentally and economically -- the ambitious aim of many of the DM proposals, winners and non-winners alike.  At the panel on "Taking an Idea to Scale," Dr. Tran said: "A long-term commitment is needed.  The social agenda takes time to happen.  The normal [Development Marketplace] funding cycle of one or two years would be too short to bring about changes."

Juror Fred Onduri, who is chair of the Least Developed Countries Expert Group with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as head of the Policy and Planning Department of the Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says two years "is not enough."  He thinks the national governments of the countries where the winning projects would be developed should fund them in the out years.

Ideas, anyone?