Pressing and persistent social problems, conflicts and closing civic spaces around the country, calls out for more intelligent, effective, and innovative solutions. The need for greater cooperation among diverse marginalised and discriminated groups in the fields of community-related work is more pressing than ever before. Fostering collaborations can go a long way in creating societal change that impacts those issues.

This Call for Proposals (CfP) is designed to help Voice in Kenya and its potential grantees to test as well as learn from innovation. There exist many new, interesting and effective methods for supporting the Voice target groups in participating in their own governance and improving access to resources and services.  Voice in Kenya hopes to capture and stimulate learning of these methods so as to develop an evidence-base for future programming.

What do we wish to fund?

Project ideas that focus on at least one, but preferably more of the five marginalised and discriminated groups within Voice:

• People with disabilities
• Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, intersex (LGBTI) people
• Women facing exploitation, abuse and/or violence
• Age discriminated vulnerable groups notably the young and elderly
• Indigenous groups and ethnic minorities.

These groups are:

• most affected by poverty or making least progress towards development outcomes;
• most affected by social, economic, spatial and political exclusion;
• currently ignored or not sufficiently reached by development actors;
• at risk of repression or violence for speaking out for their rights.

Often the most marginalised and discriminated are those who may be vulnerable due to multiple reasons. Groups that are affected by more than one factor are more vulnerable to discrimination and an emphasis on learning from programming to address this phenomenon is encouraged. Therefore we have a strong preference for projects that intend to work with more than one target group and demonstrate their interdependent relationships, and the great potential for healthful, societally beneficial collaborations. Showcase that all oppression is connected.

Projects funded by Voice will need to address one or more of the impact themes:

1. improving access to (productive) resources (finance, land and water) and employment
2. improving access to social services, health and education in particular
3. fostering space for political participation:

What do we mean by Innovation?

For Voice, innovation means anything that has not been tried before in a particular context and/or with a particular target group. If you have a new idea, method or approach, you are welcome to propose it in your application. Innovation also means using tried and tested influencing, mobilisation, meaningful engagement methods but for new purposes and with new target groups, audience and themes.

Who do we wish to fund?

Voice encourages networks, partnership and consortia applications because each organisation may bring new ideas to the project and each partner can learn from the other. You may also wish to partner with ‘unusual suspects’ such as media companies, campaigners, artists or ‘artivists’ who may disrupt traditional ways of programming within the civil society space.

If your organisation, or consortia has implemented such programming before, then Voice could fund through this Call for Proposals to document, review, analyse and test your programming.  An essential element of the project should be some key recommendations for scaling up the programme and an effective dissemination plan of the findings.

Funding for the Innovate & Learn Grant is for a minimum duration of 12- 24 months and for a grant of €5,000 to €200,000. Please note that we have removed the income restriction of 40% so also young start-ups can apply. Also note that we will not award a Euro 200,000 grant to a young start-up so be reasonable what you ask for.   

This call for proposals is closed, so application is no longer possible. Please come back here at a later stage to learn about the grantees that have been selected in this call for proposals.

Calls for proposals for Influencing grants will be opened once a year, while for Empowerment, Innovate and Learn and Sudden Opportunity grants we accept proposals on a rolling basis. The current open calls for proposals can be found here.