UK Aid Direct was a £150 million programme designed to support civil society to reduce poverty and to achieve the Global Goals. It worked with the most vulnerable and marginalised, particularly women and girls and aimed to ‘leave no one behind’.

MannionDaniels was contracted to build the capacity of small and medium-sized civil society organisations to deliver impactful projects that met the fund’s objectives. Through the fund, we are proud that

• 9.7 million vulnerable and marginalised individuals were supported
• By 196 projects
• Working with 162 civil society organisations
• Across 37 countries.

It was our grant delivery team’s job to scrutinise applications for funding and ensure the strongest were successful. Then the performance delivery team stepped in to monitor progress, offering advice on adapting approaches and ensuring grantees complied with the terms of their grant.

We worked closely with grantees to draw out essential learning from the work they carried out and it was our role to then share these findings across the fund, during key face to face events during the reporting year.

Who else was involved?

We worked closely with our consortium partners – Oxford Policy Management (OPM), the Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) at Loughborough University, the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT)and the Education Development Trust – and developed strong and coherent approaches to manage this fund, based on our guiding principles of knowledge sharing and transparency.

Learn more in our reflective news piece about the final in-person event we held that looked back on the programme and its achievements back in October 2023.