OUR FUNDING APPROACH
Who We Fund
We support both young and established organizations that do excellent work and aspire to expand their impact over the next 3-10 years. Our grantees are a diverse group of organizations serving rural and urban communities, teenagers and adults, across Africa and in the United States. They take a wide array of approaches to helping people support themselves and their families. What they share is a passion for helping people make their own lives better and a commitment to innovating, testing, and improving their programs from year to year.
Where We Fund
We first launched in Kenya and neighboring countries. While East and West Africa are still our primary focus, we now support organizations in number of other African countries, including Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, as well as a few organizations that operate in the United States and around the world.
Our Guiding Principles
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We target interventions that have the potential to deliver 5x or more present value of increased future earnings per dollar spent (for example, if the intervention costs $100, then the present value of future income for those affected is at least $500 higher than it would have been otherwise).
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We primarily provide unrestricted and multi-year funding, and we follow approaches grounded in trust based philanthropy.
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We are willing to take risks.
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We appreciate scalability, but we are not obsessed with it. We focus on programs that can be expanded and replicated, but we also occasionally fund organizations that reliably deliver high returns to a small number of people.
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We acknowledge the importance of qualitative indicators of impact but primarily rely on quantitative indicators such as average change in incomes and number of incomes transformed
Our Sourcing Approach
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The Livelihood Impact Fund team conducts its own due diligence and sourcing and leans on peer funders and partners to identify projects to support.
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For our Lab Portfolio, please feel free to fill out this intake form if you would like to share more about your work.
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We work in close partnership with a number of organizations to help inform our grant making strategies, deploy funding and support our partners. Some of the partners we work most closely with are listed below. Please note this is not an exhaustive list. If you are a funder supporting livelihoods in Africa, and would like to explore opportunities for synergies, please reach out to us.
FUNDING ALLIES
REGRANTING PARTNERS
CAPACITY BUILDING PARTNERS
