This post was revised and edited on 1st July 2025.
There is a misconception that climate finance is all about grants. And while climate finance is much wider, there is no doubt that grants are important part of financing green, resilient health systems in low resourced settings.
The most attractive aspect of grants is that they generally do not have to be paid back.
But there are various risks to be aware of before getting started on an application.
Let’s dive in.
Overview
Grants come from many sources. They can be money made available from:
- central to local government and ringfenced for health;
- philanthropists active in international health to non-governmental organisations and, at times, to governments.;
- international organisations to Ministries of Health and/or other Ministries within national governments;
- commercial healthcare/healthcare related companies to individuals or organisations (e.g., from Pfizer [1]).
Grants are available to cover different types of costs. For instance,
- Capital costs – building works, furniture, equipment, other one-off costs;
- Revenue – salaries (full or a %), other ongoing running costs;
- Direct project costs – relating to costs of delivering a project service or objective;
- Overheads – support projects and core running costs;
- Full cost recovery – when all costs involved in a project (direct and indirect) can be recovered.
Grant funds may be restricted or unrestricted:
- Restricted means to a specific piece of work, activity or a service undertaken by an applicant within an agreed timeframe;
- Unrestricted funding is not tied to a specific project or initiative but can be spent by the applicant on any activities that fall within the grant-makers stated objectives;
- Invitation-only grant programs (also called proactive or closed program) do not accept open applications and instead grant-makers invite proposals from their preferred organisations.
A grant is often made over a short term, though a grant timeframe may be extended, or an organization may successfully reapply to the same grant maker. Grant application processes, likewise, vary and can be simple such as a concept note, or require filling-in lengthy application forms, interviews, and a lengthy decision period.
Benefits
Grants differ on eligible activity, size, and time-frames. This makes grants a flexible type of money that can support small to large projects for relatively short periods of time (3-5 years).
Activities funded through grants can include and are not limited to:
- Testing out of new interventions and innovations;
- Program development or expansion;
- Research, advocacy, and information sharing;
- Training, cooperation, networking, collaboration solving.
Short term grants can offer relatively quick funding for small projects that you want to test out while longer term grants can ensure mid-term financial stability of a programme or organisation itself, especially if funding is unrestricted.
Unrestricted funding is highly valued. “When asked if they would accept a reduced amount if their grant could be unrestricted, on average charities were willing to give up £370,000 of a £1million grant” [2].
There is a growing trend towards grant maker collaboration through co-funded projects (grant matching), or pooled funding. This trend accelerated during COVID-19. So rather than thinking of one grant for one activity, an alternative could be to consider two or more grant makers working in the same area who may be interested to collaborate with you to improve impact while at the same time, the recipient improves the financial stability of your organisation.
Grants can also build visibility and credibility. An organisation that receives one grant, is more likely to receive others – there can be a positive feedback loop when grant-makers see that other notable organizations fund your activities, they are more likely to give themselves. Grant-makers will publicise recipients and their work, drawing attention to activities and successes. So, in a sense, grants confer legitimacy to an organization and shows others that an organisation and activities are worthy of support [3].
However, the time, effort, and resources needed to identify and apply for grants leads to the risks involved with this type of money.
The Risks
Risk lies in many places:
- identifying grants that would have a reasonable chance of success;
- having the time and resources needed to manage an application;
- having time and resources to manage a successful grant.
These risks arise because there is usually a high level of competition for funds. The Wellcome Trust, for instance, gave a success rate for applications made between 2016 and 2020 as between 8% for Black, Asian, Minority UK applicants up to 14% for White UK applicants [4]. For comparison, the success rate of the EU Horizon proposals by 2021 was 15.9% [5] and crowdfunding success rates are far higher.
IDENTIFYING GRANTS
The risk of wasting time and resources is partly due to the short term nature of grants. Chasing short term grant funding instead of prioritising work on longer term reliable funding streams that are fundamentally aligned with your values and purpose can be detrimental. Focus is therefore important if you don’t have the resources to continually chase applications that may not be successful.
Since grant-makers increasingly like to see collaboration, this creates a problem for new entrants to the field who may have no or few prior relationships to call on. Relationship building to create and maintain networks is therefore needed, and this process also takes time and resources.
MAKING APPLICATIONS
Grants can have a complicated and long application process (such as with Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund).
Grant information may be in a language that you are not fluent in and require translation.
Information may be moving around networks that you don’t know how to get into or are locked out of.
Open grant calls from government departments can also have tight deadlines meaning increasing the pressure for a quick turnaround, difficult if you are low on staff in the first place.
GRANT MANAGEMENT
You need financial capacity to manage a successful grant. If those systems are not in place before a grant is obtained, they will need to be developed and instituted.
Grant income is often restricted. From the perspective of an applicant, a grant-maker often funds a single or small element and not the whole of an organizations activities and ambitions.
Grants can be awarded at less than 100% cost reimbursement, meaning a grant will not give total payback on expenditure. This means the recipient is juggling funds especially if grants are paid in arrears – and creating a situation where staff have been recruited and require delivering outputs before being paid and requiring short-term credit like a bank overdraft, or other income streams.
For grants using outcome-based-payments, there is the additional risk of expending resources but not achieving results that trigger payment.
If you collaborate on a grant, working in partnership with other recipient organisations, one partner tends to be the managing/administration partner for the partnership. This exerts its own pressures. If your partners are untested or unpredictable, and you are held responsible by the grant-maker for actions of partners that you do not control, you will increase the staff time and resources managing the partnership. If these costs were not budgeted for on the application and agreed by the grant-maker, they represent an additional cost for the managing organisation.
Grant seeking is a major investment of time, energy and other resources. A driving question for grant applicants is often ‘how can I reduce my risk of wasting my limited resources?’
Know your Why
Let’s take a step back and apply a long term gaze.
Knowing your Why [6] is an argument that people don’t buy what you do – they buy why you do it. The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of a grant application become proof of your why (your purpose). Knowing why a proposed activity matters and how it leads to a different future is basically articulating ‘impact’.
Clarity on how one grant can lead to the next (grant and other financing) means understanding grants as a scaffold for green, resilient health systems that emerge over the next 2, 5,10, 20, or 40 years. Being able to explain how a small piece of work is part of your long term vision for decarbonizing health systems and strengthening resilience in the face of climate change is important for all of your investments.
Know your Exit at point of Entry.
Knowing your exit means determining when and how your activity will end and knowing this from the outset. Clearly your exit strategy can change over time – you once thought the activity could be mainstreamed but after seeing results you think otherwise. The point is to have a sense of the exit from the very beginning.
Successful grants mean that you now have money to do work that you didn’t have before. But implementing a grant comes with costs. Will a successful project require more staff or more buildings or more equipment or more transportation? What happens when the grant cash flow is gone? Are staff going to be fired? Will equipment be dumped? Will buildings be left empty? What happens to the people you have been working with? Will the activities be wound down?
In other words, what is the project exit within the parameters of your overall purpose?
When you know this, you can manage a grant exit in a way you would like because you have transition time. Transition time can change the activities you plan to do with grant money or how you undertake them. For example, if you know that the exit of a grant is to fully close down the activity, perhaps you will take more risks during the activity as you are not attached to a longevity outcome.
Financial transitions out of grant support are not something that is pegged-on at the end rather are an integral part of a grant application and project management from the very outset. Not all grant-makers have explicit transition policies or request clear plans for exit. Regardless, knowing what will happen at the end of a grant from the very beginning, means that a grant can achieve greater impact.
It’s also useful to remember that grants do not intrinsically require to have long term impact. Grants can be explicitly short-term e.g., various grant spending under COVID19. Some grant-makers themselves expect to fully spend out all funds (e.g., Atlantic Philanthropies). Longevity through mainstreaming by government, or replacement funds is not always necessary. The role of a grant can be to identify and test out ideas, to take risks and fail. It’s not important for every single grant activity to be long lived. More important is how a grant contributes to the long term work of building green resilient health systems.
Networking
Grant seekers, whether individuals or organisations, are always encouraged to build and strengthen a network with core funders because doing so opens up opportunities that you could never imagine.
But networking, especially with people you don’t yet know can be uncomfortable and time consuming. This is where the 80/20 principle comes in.
The 80/20 rule encourages strategic concentration of effort rather than a scatter gun approach. This means both strategic concentration on a group of critical grant-makers and key people during networking.
Networking is not talking to anyone or everyone. Its talking to a small group of people who can bridge you into social and information networks that you are not currently part of. It’s making small changes to the way you present your work to your critical audiences. And linking into small changes in context that flag the increased recognition of health systems in climate change action.
You can search for the ‘Few’ and test out our ideas by:
- Talking with your existing grant-makers;
- Exploring your existing networks;
- Joining In-person meetings and conferences;
- Joining Online meetings, webinars and asking questions, follow up with speakers by email or text;
- Listening to podcasts and following up with speakers.
Clearly all of this takes time. But it is realistic to focus on a core list of grant-makers demonstrably aligned to green health systems for low resourced setting and strategically concentrate networking effort to find the few individuals who can make the greatest impact.
Reflect & Review
Finally, you need to know whether all the work involved in finding, applying, obtaining, and managing a grant has been ‘worth it’.
Reflection on the grant-seeking process at regular intervals is important and doesn’t have to take a lot of time. For instance, reflection can be encouraged in regular organisational monthly meetings or annual planning events.
Some questions to consider during reflection include [7]:
- Do we still know what our goals are?
- Are we making progress on achieving our goals?
- How do we know that we are/not making progress?
- What still needs to be done?
- Should we hold or change course?
References
[1] Pfizer https://www.pfizer.com/about/programs-policies/grants
[2] ACF (2019) Firm Foundations: Setting Your Grant Making Strategy Association of Charitable Foundations, London
[3] PlanStreet https://www.planstreetinc.com/why-are-grants-important-for-nonprofits/
[4] Wellcome Trust https://wellcome.org/reports/grant-funding-data-2019-2020
[6] Sinek S (2011) Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to take Action Penguin
[7] ACF (2019) Funding Practices: The Pillars of Stronger Foundation Practice Association of Charitable Foundations, London