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Developing a grant proposal

Grant Proposal

The purpose of writing a grant proposal is to convince the funding institution to fund your project because of its viability. Therefore, you must prepare adequately not only to get the attention of the funding institutions but also to qualify for a grant.

The first step towards developing a grant proposal is to familiarize yourself with the requirements or the criteria for the funding institutions. Familiarization will help the applicant gather important information such as:

  • When funds are available
  • Deadline by when applications should be made, and
  • The process used to make applications etc


While preparing to write a grant proposal, understand that different institutions have different specific requirements: never generalize! You might find it necessary to attend grant proposal writing workshops or request grant proposal writing assistance if you lack the experience required to write a winning grant proposal.

Besides understanding the requirement of the funding institution, you must develop your ideas carefully and tactfully. To write a winning grant proposal, the ideas you present must be in line with the mission of your organization or group, and in some cases, they need to line up with the mission of the granting institutions. To win your case, the following should reflect in the proposal:

  • The objectives of the project, requirements of the projected, and expected outcome.
  • A plan of how the project will be executed- the plan includes a timetable of the different activities, when they will be executed, and how they will be executed.
  • Criteria to assess the success of the project.
  • Human resources required for completing the project successfully. State the availability of staff and if there is a need to bring in more specialized expertise to complete the project successfully.
  • A budget- state the financial implications of the project.

NB– while writing the grant proposal, establish that ideas presented are not duplicated in other projects, and if that were to be the case, consider improving the previous version.