an active approach
to grant management

The foundation takes an active approach to grant management: Program officers help grantees set milestones; establish and track relevant measures of success; analyze data about results; and make recommendations to strengthen best practices and eliminate weak ones.

To better direct the complexity inherent in this approach, we group our efforts into several key portfolios: In the United States, India and South Africa, they include education and health. In India, we also focus on family economic stability as a baseline precursor to good childhood health and academic success.

Within and across these portfolios, we invest in programs that tackle multi-component problems. For instance, our health efforts address complex issues like childhood obesity at multiple levels, with support for grassroots, community-based initiatives alongside support for sophisticated, research-oriented institutions that have an international reach. Likewise, our educational work reaches children and youth in school from kindergarten through university graduation, and includes both after-school and wrap-around support programs. Where appropriate—for instance in India—we layer health efforts on top of educational programs to reach those who might otherwise slip through the cracks.

2010 saw the acceleration of efforts to ensure critical connectivity among staff, grantees and other stakeholders working on these multilevel initiatives. Over the course of the year, we implemented new grant management processes and tools that decrease administrative tasks and give grant officers more time to focus on thoughtful analysis and research. These new techniques have increased transparency foundationwide, allowing us to more easily make connections between lessons learned in one portfolio and ongoing challenges in another.

We recognize that dollars are only one tool that we have at our disposal. Others include knowledge, networks, expertise, influence, technical assistance and tools to build capacity. In that context, connecting the dots allows us to unearth new insights that we can then share with grantees, policy experts, regulators, socially innovative businesses and others to drive exponentially greater gains for exponentially greater numbers of children.

Caitlin Baron, South Africa

Kevin Byrne, US Education

Geeta Goel, Microfinance

Dr. Aliya Hussaini, Global Health

Debasish Mitter, India Education