Up to €4M Development Innovation Grants
- Organization: Fund for Innovation in Development (FID)
- Type: Grant
- Location: Global
- Funding: Fully Funded
The Fund for Innovation in Development is a grant fund hosted by the Agence Française de Développement and chaired by Esther Duflo, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019. It backs organisations testing new ways to cut poverty and inequality in low and middle income countries, and pays for the research that shows whether those ideas actually work. There is no closing date: FID reads applications all year round, and you can apply straight to the funding stage that matches how far along you already are. **What you get:** - Up to €200,000 at the Pilot stage, to test a solution in real conditions after prototyping - Up to €1,500,000 at the Impact evaluation stage, to measure your effect against a credible counterfactual - Up to €4,000,000 at the Scale up stage, once your impact and cost effectiveness are already proven - Up to €500,000 for public entities under either the Innovation and Public Policy or the Evidence and Public Policy stage - Indirect costs covered where they are justified and proportionate to the project - A decision on your initial application in roughly three months, with no fee to apply **What you'll do:** - Use FID's decision tree to pick your funding stage, then file a short initial application through the online portal in French or English - Set out a theory of change, scientific evidence that your approach works, and a costed case that it beats existing alternatives - Show a realistic path to scale that does not depend on FID funding continuing - Answer follow up questions from FID staff and outside sector experts over roughly one to four months - Go before a Review Committee of independent experts, who make the final funding recommendation **Key dates:** - Applications accepted at any point in the year, with no closing date - Information and Q&A session in English on September 9, 2026, 4:00 PM to 4:45 PM French time - Decision on an initial application in about three months - First payment roughly twelve months after you apply - The two preparation stages, each up to €50,000, are paused and reopen in 2027 **More information:** - The Call for Projects Guide, the decision tree, the Word application form and the Excel budget template all download from FID's Submit a Proposal page - Applications are accepted in French or English - FID does not check your eligibility before you submit, so test yourself against the guide first - An organisation may file more than one application, but FID will rarely fund two projects from the same organisation at once - A rejected project can be resubmitted once substantial changes have been made
