About the opportunity
What this programme is offering
What are the attributes of a strong DRK candidate organization?
Problem-first: Organizations addressing an urgent or critical social or environmental problem in an innovative fashion and in a way that directly benefits underserved populations.
Systems-thinking: Organizations with solutions work within existing systems, leveraging existing stakeholders, infrastructure, and incentives to grow their impact.
Scalable: Organizations with solutions can scale significantly, in that they can grow exponentially over time to directly impact a minimum of 10,000 lives within the next five years, and ambitions to grow well beyond that.
Geographically aligned: Organizations operating in our priority geographies of Africa, Europe, India, and the United States, although we will also consider opportunities in Latin America in select situations.
Independent entities: Organizations that are structured as independent nonprofit or impact first, mission-driven for-profit entities, including US 501(c)3 and its non-US equivalents, C corporations, B corporations, hybrid organizations, and fiscally sponsored organizations where there is a plan to spin out.
Financially sustainable: Organizations that have at least a growable stream of earned income revenues or plans to develop an earned income revenue stream in the immediate future.
Measurable evidence of impact: Organizations that are developing solutions based on data and clear evidence of what works, and through their pilot(s) have a demonstrated ability to clearly and effectively measure their impact on underserved populations.
Early stage: Organizations that are early stage, which we define as post-pilot and pre-scale. This typically means:
Your program, product or service is already being used in the market or in the field,
You have early indication that your model is having its intended impact on the beneficiary populations,
Your organization is relatively young (ideally between two and five years old, although we will consider both younger and older organizations).
Venture funding: In the case of for-profits, we typically support Seed to Series A organizations, and never lead rounds; we also generally but not exclusively refrain from participating in financings exceeding a $15M USD post-money valuation.
How to apply