The job today is email, Excel, and reviewer chaos

If you’re a local foundation, a pooled fund, an INGO running a re-granting programme, or a government fund distributing to community organisations, your job looks the same regardless of sector: receive restricted funding, run an application round, score what comes in, award it, disburse the money, collect reports back from the organisations you funded, and roll all of it up into the format your own donor expects.

Most organisations doing this today are stitching it together from an inbox, a shared spreadsheet, and whatever the last reviewer remembered to update. Scoring is inconsistent between reviewers. Nobody can trace a disbursement back to the results it produced without a manual reconciliation. And when the donor report is due, someone spends a week turning six months of scattered updates into a document.

As international donors increasingly fund through local and national organisations rather than directly, more organisations are stepping into this dual role — funded on one side, funding others on the other — often for the first time, without a system built for it.

What you can run on Monival today

Monival wasn’t built as a grants tool first — it was built as an M&E platform, which turns out to cover most of what a re-granting programme actually needs day to day:

Score applications on a consistent, weighted basis. Monival’s evaluation engine runs scored review campaigns with weighted criteria and anonymous peer review, and computes a composite score per applicant automatically. Build the same application as a Monival form — with conditional logic and, if you’re migrating from KoboToolbox or ODK, an XLSForm import to bring your existing questions and choice lists across — and route it through a review campaign instead of an inbox.

Keep every grantee’s compliance documents current. Due-diligence and compliance questionnaires live in the same tenant as your programme data, with recurrence and expiry, so a grantee’s statutory paperwork doesn’t quietly lapse between disbursements.

Track the money. The budgets and donors module gives you a place to record what came in from your funder and what went out to each grantee, instead of a separate spreadsheet nobody trusts.

Monitor grantees in the field, even where connectivity doesn’t reach. The same offline-first mobile data collection your M&E team already uses works for grantee monitoring visits — submissions are captured on-device, duplicate-proof, and sync automatically once the enumerator reconnects.

Report upward, in a format your donor can use. Build a report on the drag-and-drop report canvas, share a public link, or feed the numbers directly into your donor’s own Power BI dashboard through Monival’s live OData feed.

What’s still in build

One piece doesn’t exist yet: a dedicated workflow for the application round itself — defining eligibility rules, opening and closing a round, and generating a formal award record tied to a decision. Today you’d build the application as a Monival form and score it through the evaluation engine, but there’s no purpose-built “round” object sitting on top of that.

We’re building it. Rather than sell it before it exists, we’re opening a design-partner waitlist — the people who join now shape what it needs to do.