How will InfoDev Gateway program to support Country Gateways be organized?

-- Oleg Petrov (opetrov@worldbank.org), September 08, 2000

Answers

The InfoDev program will allocate planning and implementation grants to support Country Gateways setup. Planning grants of up to $75K will be allocated to the succesful applicants. Implementation grants will be allocated to those countries which have successfully completed preparation phase.

The purpose of the planning grants is to complete the preparation phase. Those countries who have completed the preparation phase to a large degree or have enough money to do so can also apply but will need to justify that some activities still need to be funded extra (e.g. move to the Global system, online community development, legal docs preparation etc).

Sometime later this year we will allocate another million for implementation grants but these will be conditional on matching contributions from other funding partners. If you are at advanced stage, you can probably get a small planning grant for two-three months and then apply for an implementation grant.

Those countries that have recently started identification phase (e.g. Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Dominica) will probably get more money than those who have got funded from GDG or other sources already.

One could assume that most advanced countries should expect to receive 25-40K to complete preparation (KG, RO, GE, AM, WBG), intermediate group - 40-50K (UA, MD, KZ) while those who recently started could get 50-75K (Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, DR, etc). High risk countries could still get some money (up to 30-50K) if they ask for a modest amount and find strong local partners/co-financiers (AZ, UZ, TJ, BY).

You should start preparing applications asap in order to complete them by Sep. 30 and receive money in early October.

The key is to build a coalition of partners led by the grant proponent, ideally a development NGO, major content provider, ISP or business consultancy. Please identify the partner that is most committed, most competent and credible that will apply on behalf of the coalition. This partner will be a key co-founder of the NGO once the time comes.

-- Oleg Petrov (opetrov@worldbank.org), September 08, 2000.