Are you an organisation that is led and governed by one of Voice’s target groups? Do you see an opportunity to guide or influence national or local bodies in Laos so that they are more open and receptive to the needs and interests of your target group?  Do you want to inspire attitudinal and policy change among people and governments in Laos towards your target group? Do you want to try innovative and new ways to influence?

If you answered “yes” to the questions above, then consider applying to this Call for Proposals.

What do we wish to fund?

This Call for Proposals will help Voice in Laos meet its objectives. Voice will fund projects that focus on the following target groups:

• People with disabilities
• Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-gender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) groups
• Indigenous people and ethnic minorities

With at least one of the following target groups as a cross-cutting issue?

• Age discriminated vulnerable groups notably the young or elderly
• Women facing exploitation, abuse and/or violence

Often the most marginalised and discriminated are those who may be vulnerable due to multiple reasons. Therefore, Voice has a strong preference for projects that intend to work with more than one target group to address overlapping vulnerabilities.

Your project can look at any or all of the following themes:

• Improved access to (productive) resources (finance, land and water) and employment,
• Improved access to social services, health and education in particular, and
• Fostering space for citizen participation

Your grant can be from €25,000 to €200,000 and from 18 to 30 months in duration.

What do we mean by Innovation:

For Voice, innovation means anything that has not been tried before in a particular context. 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 methods but for new purposes and with new target groups, audiences and themes.

Voice encourages network, partnership and consortia applications because each organisation may bring new ideas to the project and each partner can learn from each other.  You may also wish to partner with “unusual suspects” like media companies, campaigners and artists who may encourage new ways of advocacy and influence.

Who do we wish to fund?

Applications are only being accepted for locally registered Lao organisations as lead applicant. International organisations are not able to be a lead applicant but can team up as a co-applicant in the case of consortium applications.

The (lead) applicant must be target group-led.  This means that the target group that the organisation aims to represent governs and manages the organisation and the principle of Nothing About Us Without Us guide the work.

What we won’t fund:

• Organisations with an annual turnover of over €2 million.
• An application where the grant awarded from Voice are more than 50% for of the total annual income of the applicant organisation. The way to calculate this is to divide the requested amount by the annual income. If the result of this calculation is over 50% you can either reduce the requested amount or team up as part of a consortium where you can add up the budgets
• Funding of commercial services, investment or other commercial activities.

Please take our eligibility test in the next tab to make sure that you qualify for the grant.

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.