A New Strategy for Long-Lasting Impact

In 2024, Spark celebrated reaching over one million people since our founding. Now, we’re setting our aims higher with a new strategy to reach an additional one million lives over the next three years. We envision the decentralization of aid to the village level so that every community can determine their own development.

In pursuit of this vision, we are expanding our pilot programs in Rwanda and Malawi to establish national initiatives in collaboration with the national governments. We aim to generate evidence of our approach through rigorous evaluations and test effective ways to influence billions of dollars in aid. Over the next three years, we will reach over one million new lives and chart a path toward reaching 20 million more.

2025 marks an important year as we begin our journey toward achieving these goals. In 2025, we plan to:

• Launch the FCAP in 250 new villages.

• Complete baseline data collection for the RCT in Malawi.

• Test potential pathways for influencing World Bank capital flows, such as a joint ‘big push’ on community-driven development research and standards work.

Here’s what we hope to achieve: 

Spark is raising a $40M philanthropic round to back a three-year strategy centered around three pathways: 

1. Establish national flagship programs: Establish role model programs in Rwanda and Malawi that will inspire additional countries to adopt the program. Rwanda and Malawi will serve as a training ground and an experimentation lab for model optimization. This will include three key deliverables:

1. Reach 1,000 new villages across all countries.

2. Design national framework and facilitation adoption by Government, enshrining the model into law.

3. Bring together a financing coalition to back the national framework via Government and partners.

2. Establish new evidence: Organize a ‘big push’ on village cash and facilitation research to fill evidence gaps on facilitation, livelihoods, gender equity, platform approach, and climate. This will include three key deliverables:

1. Innovations for Poverty Action’s independent research on Spark’s Rwanda program published.

2. Launch RCT in Malawi.

3. Support researchers to set up a third rigorous study on the FCAP to fill additional research gaps.

3. Decentralize aid financing to the village level: Facilitate regional gatherings to discuss emergent research with World Bank teams, x-lateral institutions, and their clients on village cash and facilitation and provide design support to newly financed programs to move money into village cash and facilitation programs. Our key deliverable will be to:

1. Test pathways towards influencing the World Bank and x-laterals, such as potentially setting up a Trust Fund to accelerate the design of new village grants and facilitation programs, establishing global standards and more.