Development Marketplace
Development Marketplace (DM) is a competitive grant program of the World Bank that funds innovative, small-scale development projects DMs primary objective is to identify and support creative cutting-edge solutions to the most pressing social and economic concerns of our time; ideas that deliver results and have the potential to be expanded or replicated. In this way, the World Bank gains insight from grassroots practitioners who have important contributions to make in the fight against poverty, and can share their experience with the broader development community. Ultimately, the DM seeks to find solutions beyond established channels through an open, transparent, and competitive process with minimum cost and bureaucracy.
The Development Marketplace program operates at two levels: global and country. In both cases, DM uses a transparent process to surface innovations that address development challenges at the community level. DM competitions are designed to attract ideas from a range of innovators; civil society groups, social entrepreneurs, foundations, academia, and private sector corporations, as well as staff from the World Bank and other donor organizations. It draws together people and institutions with varied affiliations and objectives to work in partnerships to find innovative development solutions.
After a thorough review of the proposals by development experts, the most innovative and potentially viable are selected to present at the Marketplace, where the finalists compete in-person for grants to help their ideas spring to life. A jury of development professionals meets with each finalist team to listen to their ideas and decide which projects merit funding.
Each Marketplace also features a Knowledge Exchange, designed to engage the finalists with other representatives of the international development community. This provides an opportunity to highlight their work and share best practices.
The winners receive funding and other forms of assistance to help execute their proposals. Periodically, the DM team undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of the winning projects to gather lessons from implementation and disseminate them within the World Bank and to the development community at large.
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