The Agency Fund_Open Window Grants, Due: Mar 16, 2025

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About Us

The Agency Fund is a multi-donor partnership focused on innovations and organizations that support people in the navigation of difficult lives. Our open window calls for research and innovation concepts within the general scope of our approach, without further thematic or geographic restrictions.

Background for our Open Window

Recent advances in experimental social science show that even people who live in extremely difficult conditions, and who appear to have very limited options, can derive major benefits from insights that engage their consciousness, affirm their dignity, and support them in charting a path forward. Remarkable impacts can follow on subjective indicators like self-efficacy and life satisfaction, as well as with objective development outcomes like income, health status, and educational attainment.

The expansion of mobile technology, along with the falling cost of data in low-income settings, makes it possible to bring evidence-based guidance to people in poverty as well. A number of organizations are already pioneering this approach.

For example:

• Non-profit Precision Development provides smallholder farmers in India and Africa with agricultural advisory services that are tailored to local agronomic conditions.
• Non-profit ConsiliumBots helps Latin American students and their families navigate the public education options that are available to them.
• Shujaaz, a social venture, builds digital tools that help East African micro-entrepreneurs seek and share advice on informal street hustles.

We are interested in these and similar ideas that give people access to localized, actionable insights that may prove useful to them in the navigation of their difficult economic prospects.

What and How We Plan to Fund
We seek to make grants to time-limited research and innovation projects that pilot, design, and test concrete solutions. The strongest applications will score well on the following:

• Relevance to Human Agency:
  • Is this approach aligned with ours? Does it engage people's consciousness and embrace their dignity? Does it unearth situationally relevant insights about people’s options, capabilities, or future? Does the context realistically afford people alternative choices?
• Leverage & Synergy:
  • Does the idea elegantly leverage technology to engage people in a customized, interactive, and scalable manner? Alternatively, does it build on an existing user base, case worker network, or policy mechanism? Is there potential for cross-fertilization with other approaches that the Agency Fund is involved with?
• Data & Learning:
  • Is this approach idea grounded in scientific evidence (e.g., from development economics or social psychology?) Does the applicant organization use data to for precision and rapid adaptation? Is there a path to exceptional cost- effectiveness?
• Team & Management:
  • Does the team come with ample local context as well as a track record of rigorous and open research? Are the timelines ambitious?

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website.

Eligibility:

• We do fund research, including academic research. We are generally interested in rigorous impact evaluations that study the potential, or evaluate the cost-effectiveness, of agency-led approaches.
• Yet even in non-academic proposals, we seek a strong commitment to learning. We see our endgame as a vibrant ecosystem of “learning organizations” that operate at the intersection of research and action - trying to have an impact now while learning how to become even more impactful in the future.
• We offer fellowships to people with or without institutional affiliation.
• Institutions worldwide can apply for other funding. We highly value and encourage applications from low- and middle-income countries.
• For-profits may be eligible for project funding and seed investments (by invitation-only), but are ineligible for unrestricted grants.
• Where possible, we prefer donating to U.S. 501(c)(3) public charities for efficiency; but this does not affect our selection.

https://www.agency.fund/apply

Application Cycles
Mar 16, 2025 2:59am EDT
May 1, 2025 2:59am EDT
Sep 30, 2025 2:59am EDT
Mar 16, 2026 2:59am EDT