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The executive summary will be a brief introduction and justification of the proposal which needs to be shorter and more summarized when compared to an abstract. Most importantly, it should contain the problem (development challenge) which is the target of the project, and the solution to the problem in the proposed project; and other parts of the text will be written for enhancing and explaining the purposes of the two components. The attractive thinking will be maintained here to give reasons to the donors to finish reading of the whole proposal.
Ideally, a good summary will start with the problem and its impact to the society, the proposed solutions to the problem and their expected results, and the goal which the project will finally reach. A brief time frame will also help the donors to understand the need of the project. We may call the content of the executive summary as Why, How, and What: why you want to start the project to resolve what problem; how you plan to resolve the problem; and what goal you want to reach at the end of the project.
If it is uneasy to start writing a summary, you may try to use only one sentence to summarize each of those important sections in the proposal, and then try to organize them together to make the main problem and its solutions more clear and predominant. You may comment here that how competitive your solutions are compared to other existing projects. And then add in the goal and the time frame at the end.
The following is an example:
Improving the Governmental Policy Decision Making in Mumbai – Executive Summary
It has been observed that the policy decisions have been made by few governors and chief officers in the District Five of Mumbai without any involvement of the local populations in the past years, and people living in the District are expressing disagreements and looking for solutions. In this project, we propose to conduct a survey to collect local populations’ opinions of the governmental policy approval procedures, and to promote the local government to consider local people’s voices based on the survey. The project will eventually lead to the conversations and discussions between the local government and the populations to improve the current situation. This project is proposed for two years.
