Project Selection Criteria

Project selection criteria

Our goal is to provide children with the opportunities they deserve by promoting education, safety and promoting development needs. Keeping this goal in mind, we choose projects based on the following six criteria:

Education for children

We focus on projects that provide education to children in Africa or India, and as such significantly improve the chances of children living in difficult conditions. Although most of our funds will be directly spent on education, parts of it may also be spent on costs that are directly linked to education of children, such as healthcare, construction and community support

Progress to “graduation”

Focus on projects that either have the ability of:

  • becoming financially fully self-sustainable, or
  • becoming eligible to obtain support by a larger professional charity or broader community.

Independence

Our projects should not be structurally dependent on our permanent funding. Our support should contribute to becoming either:

  • financially fully self-sustainable ,or
  • eligible to obtain support by a larger professional charity or a broader network of sponsors. 

As such we require the projects we select to show personal involvement and commitment by setting objectives and realistic short and long term goals. A4C will help the projects to build capacity and professionalism leveraging our own professional experience. We aim to support projects for a number of years and will review each project on an annual basis.

Local anchoring

Our projects are typically based on a engaging and constructive collaboration between project representatives (founder(s) or other highly involved individual(s)) based in The Netherlands or United Kingdom and A4C. 

In addition, local anchoring is a prerequisite for our project selection. Personal involvement of parents, teachers and the local community ensures the strong and steady commitment to the projects. As such the project representatives operate as single point of contact and linking-pin between ourselves and the local community.

Transparency

We require our projects to be fully transparent on the allocation of our funding. As such, we also require the project to be granted a non-profit status.

The project manager needs to clarify objectives as well and short and long term goals. We expect them to communicate regularly through our monitoring reports and update us when any relevant event occurs. As such we require a collaboration set-up where the NL or UK-based project representative operates as single point of contact and linking-pin between A4C and local individuals involved in the project.

Through transparent reporting and communications we aim to:

– Ensure that support is going to the underpriviliged

– Ensure that the support has scalable impact

We use our professional experience and financial skills when conducting due diligence on projects eligible for selection.

Small scale

We primarily select small scale projects to ensure maximum added value and impact of our investment. This way we can set realistic goals for the projects we select and have a clear overview on how our funding is allocated. The growth of our funding will lead to diversification among several small projects.

Whilst our annual donation size can vary per project we aim to comply with the following criteria:

  • Our annual donation should comprise at least 10% of the projects annual funding received on education
  • A4C will not be the only charity providing the educational funding.
  • Previously overlooked opportunities – do something somebody else is not doing, take the seed risk