Deadline: 30-Jun-23
The Open Government Partnership (OGP) with the support of the European Union, is launching Open Door Grants, an ongoing call for project proposals for Eastern Partnership (EaP) OGP members.
Open Door Grants is an open, responsive, and quarterly grant making window led by the OGP Support Unit. It focuses on project ideas that offer a response to emerging challenges on a country level.
Objectives
- The main objective of these grants is to expand and strengthen civil society engagement and foster multi-stakeholder partnerships for tackling relevant open government reforms in active OGP member countries and locals in the Eastern Partnership region.
Purposes
- The grants will be used for one of the following purposes:
- to propose and implement catalytic approaches to open governance reforms and advocate for their inclusion as commitments in OGP action plans;
- to support co-implementation, monitoring and oversight of action plan commitments, ideally focusing on approaches that can be scalable across action plan cycles; or
- to promote, implement, and/or monitor open government reforms related to European integration processes.
- The grants will also be used to explicitly expand the base of civil society and other non-governmental actors engaging with OGP in the EaP countries and locals. Strong preference will be given to ideas that engage new actors like the private sector, media, or youth groups.
Priority Areas
- OGP is seeking proposals for strengthening civil society engagement in OGP around the following policy areas:
- Anti-corruption
- Justice
- Public service delivery, including strengthening citizen participation and feedback mechanisms, or enhancing government responsiveness to users for improving public services
- Civic space and media freedoms
- Access to information
- Open governance and participation in post-war reconstruction and recovery
- Business integrity and ease of doing business
- Any other themes related to crisis response, recovery, or renewal
Funding Information
- Up to 25,000 EUR for 4-12 months of the implementation period.
Award Funds can be used for
- purchase, rental or leasing costs for equipment and supplies, including those needed for continuous work during the electricity cuts (provided that ownership is transferred at the end of the action when required);
- goods and contractual services for specialised tasks (translations, production of documents, external consultants time, accountancy, etc.);
- activities, including local travel, accommodation and subsistence costs, etc.;
- cost of staff assigned to the action;
- admin costs directly assigned to the action (supplies, rental of meeting rooms, etc.);
- general admin costs (overhead costs) up to 7% of the total eligible direct costs for the action (maintenance, utility bills, office furniture, etc.).
Eligibility Criteria
- The call for this category of grants will be open to registered civil society organisations and consortia from Armenia, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. Preference will be given to multi-stakeholder teams. Cross-country partnerships are allowed.
- Applications are also welcome from organisations not engaged with OGP at this time. However, applicants should be willing to work closely with the OGP Support Unit, the country’s OGP Multi-Stakeholder Forum (Coordination Council) and the official Point of Contact. Applicants will also ideally engage the EU delegation in the country for relevant activities.
- Re-applications from former grantees are welcome, although preference will be given to organisations that have not been supported from the Open Door Grant before.
- Applicants should be willing to document and share their approaches, methodologies and outputs, and participate in OGP-organised peer exchange and learning events.
Ineligibility
- funds cannot be used for:
- costs that are not associated with the purpose of the grant;
- costs incurred outside of the grant implementation period (with the exception of costs related to final reports and audit certificates);
- costs already covered by another donor;
- personal expenses, such as clothing and toiletries;
- flight upgrades to first class;
- alcohol;
- currency exchange losses;
- debts and debt service charges (interest);
- provisions for losses or potential future liabilities;
- purchases of land or buildings, except where necessary for the direct implementation of the action;
- credits to third parties, unless otherwise specified in the special conditions;
- salary costs of the personnel of national administrations, unless otherwise specified in the special conditions and only to the extent that they relate to the cost of activities which the relevant public authority would not carry out if the action were not undertaken;
- in kind contributions (except for volunteers’ work);
- performance-based bonuses included in costs of staff;
- deductible VAT.
For more information, visit Open Government Partnership.