Deadline: 17-Oct-21
The D-Prize offers an opportunity for you to design a new NGO or a business that delivers a proven poverty intervention at scale. Apply for the D-Prize to build a new organization and solve one of the Distribution Challenges.
- Health Access
- Clean Water
- Education
- Agriculture
- Livelihoods
- Energy
- Public Services
- Custom
Award Information
D-Prize will award the most promising teams with up to $20,000 USD to launch wherever extreme poverty exists.
- Round 1
- Submit your concept note and resume(s). We generally receive 1700 submissions per competition.
- Round 2
- Top 5% of entrepreneurs are invited to submit a full proposal. You will have two weeks to draft and submit.
- Final Round
- Top entrepreneurs interview via phone and email. The top 1% will receive up to $20,000 to launch.
- Launch
- You will spend the next three months using your talent to start a venture that can grow and help millions of people.
- D-Prize is for aspiring entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world, of any age, and any background. The majority of the awardees have not launched nor raised any funding.
- D-Prize will consider funding existing organizations only if you are piloting a new distribution-focused initiative, and you have a need for high-risk capital that cannot be supported by your current donors or revenue.
- Existing organizations applying to D-Prize should have operated for no more than 18 months and raised no more than $30,000 in outside funding.
- D-Prize apologizes, but at this time they are only able to evaluate applications submitted in English. However, your English does not need to be perfect to apply, and grammar and vocabulary errors will not be penalized. They only want to understand your idea.
Since 2013, D-Prize has used seed support to help activate more than 200 social ventures. Every six months 1700+ teams apply to our global competition, and about 1-1.5% are selected for startup support.
Ventures we support consistently achieve early-stage scale. 13% have grown to serve at least 100K people within their first five years, or are on track to reach this milestone. Cumulatively the network has delivered more than a dozen proven poverty interventions and reached 5.3M people.
Our marginal impact comes from helping new teams that we believe otherwise wouldn’t find support. 80% of ventures we award have raised less than $5K when we partner. We support talented people from across the globe, but especially target leaders operating in their home geography. 90% of the ventures we support have founders local to a developing region. 40% are female-founded.
For more information, visit https://d-prize.org/#challenges