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Building grants via funding blocks
Imagine spending hours staring at an excel sheet, trying to carefully transfer numbers from various systems into an excel template, then checking the excel template formulas to compute a final figure. This process is then repeated all over again, by your colleague, the checker.
This is the reality for MSF Grant Administration team. Today, MSF administers more than 150 grants, disbursing close to $4 billions annually. 💰
Out of the 150 grants, 91% are partially digitalised or have their grant computation done offline manually; an average of 2 to 3 hours is required by the officer to manually enter data for each grant, with the checker requiring approximately the same amount of time. This means that every quarter, 70-105 man days are spent to do the data entry and check the calculations! This rather onerous and repetitive task is error prone as well. 🚩
Ensuring that grant data flow from system to system was not hard. Digitilising the computation of a grant was not hard. But different grants are structured very differently, based on the policy needs and strategic outcomes of the ministry. To digitalise more than 150 variations of grants computation will be very costly and not tenable in the long run.
How might we remove the need for officers to perform grant computation manually using a solution that is not only cost-effective but scalable as well? 💡
Working with MSF Finance Division (FFD), we discovered that grants could be made up of 8 funding blocks. And all the grants could be made up a combination of the 1 or more of the 8 blocks. 🧱
This meant that it is possible to have a standardised template in which grants can be built upon. And the team modelled this using a WOG rule engine, Optimal Government Rule Engine (OGRE).
We also worked with FFD to simulate forming some of the grants into funding blocks, and demonstrated a prototype to show them how the blocks could be used to form their actual grants. The results were positive! 💯 FFD's management buy in was obtained and they had agreed that this project will be beneficial to them.
