The 2010 Marketplace on Innovative Financial Solutions for Development (2010 MIF), organized jointly by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank on 4th and 5th March 2010 in Paris, has issued an invitation to NGOs, governmental agencies, private sector companies and other types of civil society institutions to submit proposals on fresh ideas for developing “innovative, smart, fine-tuned financial mechanisms for mobilizing, channeling, and spending funds dedicated to development.”
This international competition will award grantees with grants of up to US $100,000 each, which can be used for implementing the proposed projects in addition to providing “an opportunity to feed a pipeline of exciting new ideas and may choose to continue supporting promising efforts beyond the initial $100,000 grant.”
The objectives of MIF are to “a) advance the agenda on innovative financial solutions for development; b) facilitate knowledge-sharing and learning, including South/South learning, about which approaches work, which don’t, and how to design solutions to maximize impact and cost-effectiveness; and c) spur the evolution of cutting-edge projects that apply innovative financial mechanisms to development challenges.”
As funding for developmental projects around the world is increasingly becoming complex, yet new trends have revealed that applying innovation can generate extraordinary results. Although developmental funding has diversified to address global issues such as climate change and migration, yet interventions based on innovative financial mechanisms such as microfinance have led to a remarkable impact at the ground-level. MIF observes these developments as “a mix of both financial engineering and institutional innovation and can be facilitated by technological advances.” In response to this context, MIF seeks to award funds to organizations that can propose new and creative ideas that can provide financial solutions for reducing poverty and sustainably build livelihoods by addressing market or government failures.
The themes covered in this competition are:
1. Solutions to Address Volatility and Improve Efficiency of Public Sector Finance
2. Solutions for Catalyzing Investment by and for the Enterprise and Private Sector
3. Financial Solutions to Improve Livelihoods of Poor Households
Some of the innovative ideas (as listed but not limited only to these) can be based on micro-credit lending, micro-insurance, social protection services and the flow of migrant remittances for development which can address different types of risks for the poor under the “Financial Solutions to Improve Livelihoods of Poor Households” theme. Under the second theme of “Solutions for Catalyzing Investment by and for the Enterprise and Private Sector,” ideas could be based on increasing investments from the private sector for poverty alleviation like ensuring profits for businesses that provide products tailor-made for the poor.
Proposals can be submitted online or by email. The deadline for submitting the proposals is 15 November 2009. For more information, visit this link.
