8. Budget

Guidelines

The requested budget information is meant to be a programme budget (i.e. specific allocations) from within the existing grant budget, not an additional budget. The team should identify how much time, financial, and human resources are expected to be allocated for the implementation of the engagement plan.

The main budget items to consider are: staff time; travel costs for presentations and dissemination events; media outreach, publication, translation, external communications consultants/expertise and other dissemination costs. The team should plan medium to long-term for the engagement plan.

3ie is increasing its focus on policy influencing and is recommending applicants to budget for at least 10% to 20% of their overall budget on policy engagement and research communications. This is a practice also endorsed by DfID and other donors.

Example

Chlorine dispensers: scaling of results

The research team has a very ambitious stakeholder engagement plan and raised additional funding (over 300,000USD) from Gates for dissemination which will cover the cost of a part-time communications director.