Image credit: TAI
Who do TAI members fund? How long is the average grant? If you are interested in these kinds of questions, TAI’s grants database is the place to start.
In the spirit to contribute to the publicly available information of philanthropic funding, since 2018 TAI compiles and publishes its member’s transparency, participation, and accountability (TPA) grants in a one-stop shop.
In February, TAI published its updated grants database and related graphs and charts for 2021 (to be specific, all grants active in 2021, so multi-year grants that start or end in 2021 are included). We are excited to share some insights from the database that we hope will encourage you – the funder, grantee, civil society organization, non-governmental organization, journalist, researcher – to explore on your own.
Before we dive into the insights, let me remind you that this data does not, by any means, encompass the entirety of TPA related funding of our members. Rather, we obtain this data from the programs engaged with TAI most directly, which are extremely important within our member funders.
Overall, our database contains more than 1,200 grants totaling more than $557 million from 6 funders.
So, what can you find?
For instance, if you want to learn about the nature of Open Society Foundations (OSF) funding, you can see that 57% of OSF’s funding goes to core organizational support, while 43% goes to project funding. Interested in how the other funders’ core vs project funding looks like? Go to our site and click on each of the funder’s tab to learn more.
Equally interesting is the co-grantees chart, which shows which grantees receive funding from 2 or more of our members. As you might have guessed, TAI is at the top, but who else gets support from across our membership? The Accountability Lab is funded by Chandler, Hewlett, MacArthur and OSF, while Global Witness is funded by Ford, Hewlett, Luminate, and OSF. Other grantees that enjoy 4 TAI funders include the International Budget Partnership, Natural Resources Governance Institute, Open Contracting Partnership, Open Government Partnership, and Publish What You Pay.
We can go one step further and see how much each member funds each of its co-grantees by clicking on the funder’s name on the left, as you can see with Chandler Foundation below.
A simple analysis such as this allows our members to easily identify grantee partners which they are funding concurrently, potentially leading to increased coordination, elimination of overlaps, and improved efficiency.
There is much more to explore, and we invite you to do so. If you are a data geek, you can download our database and carry out your own analysis depending on what you are interested in.
We know there is much more to analyze and much more we would like to know. Our amazing Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Fellow, will be sharing his data wish list in coming weeks and we will soon be comparing philanthropic funding with official development assistance, so stay tuned!