Accelerating Sustainable Development Through Flexible Funding

The EU-UNOPS Lives in Dignith Grant Facility addressed the significant obstacles facing development and humanitarian interventions in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, where over one-third of SDG targets are stagnant or regressing due to inadequate funding mechanisms that impose restrictive timeframes, heavy administrative burdens, and discourage necessary changes while maintaining predominantly siloed, sector-based responses with limited local participation. The facility transformed the EU's policy commitments on forced migration into tangible, results-oriented interventions by using strategic granting processes as mechanisms to operationalize policy goals through competitive selection processes. The facility's key innovation was using well-chosen grant selection criteria to incentivize behavioral changes among humanitarian and development actors, mandating partnership-based projects with diverse stakeholders including at least one local partner, requiring integrated approaches addressing multiple thematic areas to break down sectoral silos, and consciously breaking down inherent power hierarchies through direct contractual relationships for all partners with assigned budgets, reporting responsibilities, and result ownership. With €24 million allocated between 2021-2025, the facility supported 14 innovative, multi-stakeholder projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, demonstrating that strategic grant design and management can significantly advance sustainable development by incentivizing localization, participation, and integrated programming while empowering organizations typically excluded from decision-making processes through flexible funding mechanisms that allow for course correction and adaptive programming in constantly changing contexts.