ANDE partners with global and regional donors to direct financial resources to member and non-member organizations working to address the SGB sector’s most critical challenges and share learnings with the wider community.
These opportunities are meant to both drive greater resources to organizations supporting SGBs in developing economies and to ensure ANDE member expertise is leveraged efficiently. Financial resources for such funding opportunities are raised by ANDE with the funder community, packaged into context and sector appropriate regranting mechanisms, and regranted to organizations with solutions aligned with the initiative’s mission.
Since 2009, ANDE has worked with funders to create and implement effective grant-making mechanisms in developing economies, called Catalyst Funds. Catalyst Funds may target a different sector or geography, but they all share the common goal of increasing the productivity and effectiveness of ANDE members, while creating tools and insights that can help the SGB sector as a whole. The first Catalyst Fund was launched in 2009 with $1,000,000 in seed funding from The Lemelson Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Shell Foundation. Since then, more than $7.9 million has been disbursed to 92 organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with contributions from Citi Foundation, MasterCard Worldwide, Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, S&P Global, MetLife Foundation, and DFID’s Impact Programme.
The SGB Evidence Fund, a joint effort between ANDE and the International Growth Centre (IGC), supports collaborations between researchers and practitioners to understand the most effective ways to support SGBs and the economic and social impact of SGB growth. The fund is generously supported by the Argidius Foundation, USAID, and the International Development Research Centre.
This funding targets investors who are committed to advancing gender equality through their investments into target SGBs, yet lack the technical know-how. In December 2021, ANDE announced five organizations to receive one-year grants of up to $30,000 for gender-smart capacity building services to support SGBs operating in India, Brazil, or the East and Southeast Asia, Andean, or Eastern African regions.
The AWCE Fund awards projects in Sub-Saharan Africa to address the financing gap and support the growth of women climate entrepreneurs in the SGB sector. Three recipients were announced in November 2021 to receive one-year grants of $30,000-$65,500 to test models for increasing gender-lens investing into women climate entrepreneurs through innovative approaches.
This fund seeks to address the significant gap in access to finance for women-led SGBs by identifying the best strategies to get investment capital into the hands of women entrepreneurs in developing economies. In 2020, ANDE selected eight entrepreneurial support organizations to receive one-year grants of up to $150,000 in the first round of AWEF grantmaking, focused on South and Southeast Asia. The second round, in 2021, funded organizations working in eastern, western, and southern Africa.
The Argidius-ANDE Finance Challenge was launched in 2012 as the first-of-its-kind competition designed to support scalable models to provide finance for SGBs requiring early stage capital. The goal of the challenge was to accelerate the development of solutions in a number of developing economies, ideally establishing models that could be replicated. Each project, focusing on at least one of the following target countries—Burkina Faso, Guatemala, Honduras, Mali, Moldova or Nicaragua—was awarded a grant of €200,000 to conduct an extensive pilot program. A grand prize of €1 million was awarded in 2014 to Investisseurs & Partenaires, which created a local equity investment vehicle and supported infrastructure designed for SGBs in Burkina Faso.
The Argidius-ANDE Talent Challenge was launched in 2016 to identify highly promising solutions to human capital constraints in key developing economies worldwide and provide seed funding to scale these models. Approximately €1 million was awarded to five finalists to conduct pilot programs of up to three years. In 2019, the Amani Institute was named inaugural winner of the challenge for its award-winning leadership program providing an innovative and highly effective leadership development solution that creates value for SGBs that leads to immediate improved business results.
In 2016, five grants totaling USD $244,000 were disbursed to five organizations developing solutions to increase women’s access to finance using data and technology, and finding creative ways to support invention-based entrepreneurship initiatives. This fund was supported by S&P Global and The Lemelson Foundation.
In March 2018, ANDE and the MetLife Foundation awarded a total of USD $183,000 to source innovations in Brazil and Mexico around financial inclusion and financial health to ultimately help SGBs and lower income families achieve financial stability. The four grantees—ARTEMISIA, New Ventures, Village Capital, and World Vision Canada—executed projects that increase access to financial services for low- and moderate-income Latin Americans and shared learnings with the wider SGB sector.
In this 2018 challenge fund round, ANDE supported six organizations testing measurement tools, frameworks, and analytical approaches, and willing to share learnings with ANDE members to move forward the field of impact measurement and management. This round funded both collaborative projects based out of ANDE’s Learning Labs in East Africa and South Africa and individual organizational projects through an open call. This fund was supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
In 2018, ANDE, in partnership with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), launched the Gender Lens Impact Measurement Fund, which supported six collaborations with a total amount of USD $198,000 between SGB sector practitioners and researchers with the objective of building capacity, driving experimentation, and jump-starting impact measurement with a focus on gender inclusion and equality.
In 2019, ANDE launched this fund, sponsored by Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) through the Equitable Prosperity Through Private Sector Development Project (M-SAWA) and funded by the Government of Canada. The purpose of this Technical Assistance Facility was to strengthen the capacities of select small and medium enterprises in the Kenyan agriculture, constructive, and extractives sectors. Eleven SGBs received match-funding that unlocked a total of USD $165,000.