Rethinking How NGOs Find Funding – An AI-Powered Approach
Dawit Taddele Dessie
Since stepping back into the civil society space, one comment keeps resurfacing, particularly after the post-USAID funding contraction:
“We spend more time chasing grants than running our programmes.”
It’s not only that funding has tightened. It’s that the margin for error has narrowed. Fewer open calls. More competition. Less room for submitting applications that were never a strong fit to begin with.
So in partnership with Creware Technologies, we built something deliberately practical – an AI-enabled NGO Grant Matcher. Not a listing site. Not a keyword search bar.
A tool that tries to answer a harder question upfront: Is this actually a fit?
When an organisation submits its website, the system reads for substance, who you serve, what you deliver, and how you frame your work. Before anything advanced happens, it filters out what is clearly ineligible: wrong geography, expired deadlines, structural mismatches. There is little value in scoring opportunities you cannot apply for.
From there, it evaluates alignment of meaning, not just vocabulary. If your language centres on livelihoods and a funder speaks of economic resilience, the system measures how closely those ideas align. The semantic layer runs on all-MiniLM-L6-v2, combined with structured similarity scoring across mission, focus, sector priorities, explicit requirements, and target population.
The result is not a random percentage. It’s a ranked view of where alignment appears strongest.
This is still a beta version. We are testing assumptions, refining the weighting logic, and expanding the funding database across regions and thematic areas. Some parts will evolve. That’s intentional.
If you’re an NGO willing to test it and share candid feedback, a funder looking to improve alignment earlier in the process, or a partner interested in strengthening the infrastructure around this, there’s a contact section on the platform.
I’ve also recorded a short walkthrough of the beta for those who want to see how it works in practice.
Open to thoughtful conversations.
Refer to https://grantmatcher.creware.tech to view and test Grant Matcher.
(Dawit Taddele Dessie is a Kenyan development strategist, and Managing Partner of Creware Technologies)
