The World Bank-administered Development Marketplace (DM) is a space for organizations to experiment and find innovative solutions for creating high development impact. The DM is organized as an open competition where the call for proposals is issued globally as well as regionally and NGOs and civil society organizations are invited to present their ideas for possible grant support. If the ideas are selected, funds will be granted by the World Bank to test their implementation in the field. The grants awarded for each selected project or idea is up to $200,000 at the global-level and $10,000-15,000 at the regional-level and so far, the World Bank has awarded 256 such grants in different sectors. Some of the themes of DM have been Sustainable Agriculture, Health, Nutrition and Population, Water Supply, Sanitation and Energy, Livelihoods in a Sustainable Environment and others.
As grants given out from this competition to winners have to be ultimately used for implementing the proposed project ideas, the element of monitoring and evaluation has been critical to running the whole program. For this, the World Bank has developed “Development Marketplace Grantee Toolkit: Project Design, Monitoring & Evaluation for Small Innovative Project” which will help grantees to “develop and update objectives, recognize and spell out the assumptions that the project needs to manage factors outside its control, measure progress and capture success, develop a Monitoring Plan that meets grant requirements, progress report needs and contributes to solid project management, complete a Stakeholder Communications Strategy, build an Evaluation Plan that can contribute findings to the Implementation Completion Report at the project and use project data and other information to plan for the future in a Sustainability Plan.”
The toolkit covers a wide range of components for successfully implementing and reporting a project. It touches upon areas of project development objectives, outputs, activities, inputs, recognizing assumptions and managing factors, identifying assumptions, measuring progress and capturing success, monitoring tracking, monitoring plan, organizing evaluation and the sustainability plan. It also contains project proposal template, progress report template, sample withdrawal schedule, sample monitoring plan with tracking chart and outline and implementation completion report template.
Although the toolkit is designed for grantees who have receiving funding under DM, yet it can serve as a highly useful document for NGOs applying for future DM competitions. It will give greater clarity and understanding of the DM’s strategic selection especially in context of the monitoring plan presented in the proposal. NGOs intending to participate in the next marketplace can use this document as a guide to develop proposals.
The toolkit can be downloaded from this link.
