From the archive: French innovation fund fights poverty

France’s newest development funder offers €15 million annually and takes a broad approach to innovation

Launched to considerable fanfare in France in December 2020, the Fund for Innovation in Development now has a raft of funded projects under its belt. Its year-round call for proposals is still going strong, with the same key priorities and broad application requirements. It accepts applications for up to €50,000 for early-stage ideas, through to €4 million for scale-up projects.

We spoke to Juliette Seban, executive director of FID, in September 2021. She detailed the ethos behind the scheme and frequent errors on first applications. While the essential components and requirements of the scheme are unchanged, potential applicants would be well advised to check current guidance for any changes over the past three years.

 

Top tips

Unlike at many innovation funders, early-stage grants are available before ideas are ready to pilot.
The application process is light, but make sure it’s clear how the idea will tackle poverty and inequality.
Innovation is interpreted as anything that can improve outcomes—not just technologies.
Having partners from low- and middle-income countries is an advantage but not mandatory.

In December last year, French president Emmanuel Macron announced a new funding mechanism to support innovation through France’s foreign aid budget. The Fund for Innovation in Development (FID) offers five levels of funding through an open call, covering the entire innovation process and aimed squarely at fighting poverty and inequality.

Grants start at €50,000 for early-stage ideas through to €4 million for scaling up innovations that have been through rigorous testing.

FID is open to applications from around the world as long as they focus on innovations for low- and middle-income countries, with an emphasis on countries that are priorities for French development assistance, which are largely in sub-Saharan Africa.

The funder says it is open to applications from research institutes and universities, governments and public agencies, non-governmental organisations and private companies. Projects can be proposed in any sector, but the French government’s four key areas for aid spending are education, health, climate change and gender equality.

Juliette Seban, executive director of FID, explains how things have shaped up during the first few months of the scheme.

What is FID, in a nutshell?

It’s a key initiative of the French government to modernise French foreign aid. The team started in March. We are hosted by the French Development Agency but independent in terms of governance and attribution of funding. We have a board of directors chaired by Esther Duflo, a development economist.

Does it have an annual budget?

We have €15m per year for an initial period of three years. We are an independent grant-making body, so it’s 100 per cent grant funding.

How research-focused is FID?

The goal of FID is to source high-potential solutions from innovators and researchers around the world, wherever they are based. We have a specific mandate that is the fight against poverty and inequality, so we will fund innovations that are within this mandate and we have a close link with research. We’re trying to bring together the world of innovation and the world of research to rigorously validate the potential impact of the solutions we fund.

Do you accept applications at any time?

We have a call that opened mid-March to which people can apply any time, and we are evaluating the application on a rolling basis. We’re trying to have a process that is both quick and qualitative. The online application is pretty light and then within two and a half months we try to give teams a first answer on whether we move their application to the next phase.

How are the applications evaluated?

The FID team does a first filter and then the best applications go to a second round where we have a short phase of discussion—we ask for more information and we discuss with some researchers or experts in the field. This lasts one to two months and then the project goes to a review committee that is composed of three external people who will give their opinion on the project, and then we decide based on this.

FID assesses every application against three core criteria: rigorous evidence of impact on improving the lives of people living in poverty, cost-effectiveness of the innovation and potential for scale.

How is FID different from other development innovation funding programmes?

In all innovation funds, you have phases: pilot, test and scale-up. What FID adds is two things. One is that we add preparation grants, which are very small grants of up to €50,000—we’re trying to help new actors apply who could maybe not apply for a pilot phase grant but need a small amount to do a feasibility study or a market assessment first.

The other is what we call Transforming Public Policy grants, and it’s more for governments when they scale up an innovation and need technical assistance, or if they want to institutionalise an innovation lab.

What kind of applications have you received so far?

They have mostly been early stage. I think almost 70 per cent are for the preparation grants and pilots, so the two first stages. There’s a great need for such small amounts because it can be tougher for an agency to provide these types of grants that are a bit riskier and include new actors.

At the moment, we receive around 100 applications a month, which are mostly divided between non-governmental organisations and the private sector in terms of the lead organisation, but that doesn’t mean there are no researchers involved in the projects.

Are there any kinds of applicants you would like more of?

What’s challenging for us now is how we diversify. How do we get new actors, especially from countries that are a bit underserved in terms of innovation funds, such as francophone and west African countries, to know about the fund and apply? How do we get researchers from universities in those countries involved?

Do you prefer to have members of the project teams from low- and middle-income countries?

It’s not framed this way for now. What we say is that we encourage consortia of partners with expertise that is convincing in terms of how the project is going to work. So local expertise, sectoral expertise and research in the countries which the project is focused on is an advantage in terms of application, but it’s not mandatory.

It’s also our starting year, so we wanted to see what we got in the first few months and how we should adjust the criteria later on.

Is there anything that applicants have found difficult in applications?

One criterion that we feel is hard for a lot of organisations to understand is what we expect in terms of evidence of impact. Another is cost-effectiveness, which is linked to impact—it’s looking at the cost of your intervention and its impact and being able to say the development innovation has more impact per euro than the alternative. It’s thinking about cost not in terms of whether it’s profitable or not profitable but the link between cost and impact.

What kind of questions do applicants ask?

A question we get a lot is what we mean by innovation. It’s a broad definition: it can be in terms of process, in terms of cost, in terms of reaching more people at the same time. So it’s not only technological—it can be delivering something faster or in a less costly way, or a new way of delivering medicines somewhere, or a new way of teaching.

One message is that if an organisation has a great idea to improve an outcome in the sector, they should apply, because what we consider innovation is really broad.

Do you expect projects to progress through the different stages?

It’s not a ladder, so people can arrive at any stage—they can apply directly at stage four for a scale-up if their programme has been rigorously evaluated before. We would be happy to accompany organisations throughout the stages but we are also happy if they found funding somewhere first, or if we fund the pilot and then they do the evaluation with other funding.

Any final tips for applicants?

Convince us that the innovation will give an improvement related to poverty and inequality in the sector that they tackle. What we see a lot in applications is when people say ‘There is a challenge for education in country X’, for instance, and then they present their programme and you don’t see the link.

What’s the theory of change? What are the mechanisms that will make this innovation make a difference? Explain it to us. Maybe it’s implicit for you—make it explicit for us on how it will actually change things.