Making Cents Conference Plenary: How Can You Partner with Funders?

The third and final day of the Making Cents Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference ended with a plenary session, “How to Partner with Potential Funders," moderated by Making Cents International President Timothy Nourse. Although Nourse echoed the consensus that a key necessity for implementers was “vast amounts of capital,” he also stressed the importance of fostering partnerships with donors rather than solely focusing on getting programs funded.

The panel included Rajasvini Bhansali, Executive Director of International Development Exchange (IDEX); Dr. Nicole Goldin, Senior Advisor for the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning, USAID; Deepali Khanna, Director of Youth Learning at The MasterCard Foundation; Nancy Lee, General Manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); and Florencia Spangaro, Program Officer at Citi Foundation.

The panelists all gave brief presentations regarding their respective organizations, discussing the various youth initiatives they fund and their priorities moving forward. Goldin began by speaking about USAID’s partiality for an assets-based approach towards projects that aim to augment the resources that youth already have. She also spoke about the cross-sectoral approach towards programs. Goldin also emphasized the Agency’s motto of working “by and with” youth and not just for youth, as well as the importance of youth programs grounded in evidence.

Khanna then discussed the MasterCard Foundation’s prioritization of programs in Sub-Saharan Africa and how the Foundation co-designs programs with its partners. Spangaro, on the other hand, highlighted that as a corporate foundation, Citi Foundation prefers partnerships directly through its various country offices as the value added for programs differs depending on the distinct needs at the country level. Similarly, Lee of IDB’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) highlighted the importance of thorough pre-launch research to understand the specific needs of the local markets that they serve. MIF, which Lee says was created to be more experimental than regular development institutions, also requires financial contributions from grantees, leveraging two to three dollars for every dollar it approves.

Despite the wide range of funding approaches, average grant sizes, regional foci, and degrees of involvement, there was a clear and common message from the funders. Rather than the traditional funder-grantee relationship, donors value building reciprocal partnerships with grantees grounded in mutual accountability to build effective, sustainable, and scalable youth programs.