Impact partner profile
D-Prize
Distribution equals development

2013
18 Bartol St #1099; San Francisco CA, 94133; United States of America
September 2020
Last Mile Distribution
Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia
d-prize.org
D-Prize exists to seed new ventures that are scaling the distribution of evidence-based poverty interventions. They believe that simply distributing the existing, evidence-based, and rigorously studied products and services that are known to work in low resource settings can lead to alleviating the impact of poverty.
The leverage point? Local Leaders. D-Prize believes there are many talented people who could figure out how to distribute existing solutions to communities in need. But today far too few of those leaders have resources to even get started.
The team at D-Prize work to identify high-impact health, energy, education, and other solutions that have large delivery gaps. They then give startup funding to entrepreneurs that design new organisations that are solely focused on distributing these at scale.
A core to D-Prize’s work is inclusive support. Last year, 100% of the founders they seed are local to a low or lower-middle-income country (with 38% being women-led). All but a few had raised less than $5,000 US prior to D-Prize support.
Since 2013, D-Prize has seeded over 250 distribution ventures at the earliest stage. Ongoingly, D-Prize launches 35-40 new distribution ventures a year, all of which seek to serve 100,000 people within their first 5 years. The top 10% of their ventures are on track to reach this figure, and their distribution network has already delivered proven interventions to more than 8.6 million people in need.
Core impact goals
Increase distribution
D-Prize aims to increase distribution of proven health, economic, education, and other interventions to the millions of people who still need access. Proven interventions are products and services that already exist and are known to meaningfully alleviate poverty.
Increase reach
D-Prize aim to catalyse dozens of new distribution organisations that scale and reach at least 100,000 underserved people, each.
Increase support to social entrepreneurs
D-Prize look to provide support to hundreds of aspiring social entrepreneurs launching organisations that otherwise would not launch and scale. They believe that, if early support is made available, many more people could build organisations that successfully distribute proven interventions.
Type of grant funding given
478,333 * AUD
*Unrestricted Grants funded from October 2020 to April 2024