Impact partner profile
D-Prize
Distribution equals development
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 team at D-Prize work to identify high-impact health, energy, education, and other solutions that have large delivery gaps. They then find entrepreneurs to design and launch new organisations that are solely focused on distributing these at scale.
A core to D-Prize’s work is inclusive support. Their team believes that there are many talented people in the world who could solve poverty challenges, but far too few have the resources to take the chance. As a result, 90% of the founders they seed are local to a low or lower-middle-income country, and 40% are women.
Since 2013, D-Prize has seeded over 225 distribution ventures at the earliest stage. Ongoingly, D-Prize launches 30 new distribution ventures a year on average, 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 7 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
Impact milestones
FY2022 impact milestones
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- Seed 45 new ventures through the 2022 competition programs. Out of this cohort, D-Prize maintains confidence that 4 to 6 social ventures from 2022’s competition will scale to serve 100,000 beneficiaries each within 5 years.
- Be on track to help 12 (or 44%) participants in D-prize’s “Scale Support” program to secure follow-on capital greater than or equal to 4x their initial D-Prize award within 12 months of their support program.
- Commit funding of $450k by the end of 2022 from new funders.
FY2021 impact report
12 month (Oct 2020–Sep 2021) unrestricted funded grant: $300,000 AUD
Launch 32 pilot distribution organisations - these will be selected from an entrepreneur pool across two global competitions and provided launch funding.
D-Prize launched 38 pilot distribution organisations.
Have the pilot organisations directly serve 8,000 people during an initial 3-month pilot phase.
D-Prize seeded organisations that directly served 56,102 people during their initial 3-month pilot phase. This well exceeded the FY2021 target of 8,000. It results from seeding 19% more pilots than expected and encouraging some organisations to deliver poverty interventions meant to reach large numbers of people, such as chlorine dispensers that provide clean water to entire villages.
Ensure that the interventions distributed to those people will directly result in a mix of positive health, energy, economic, and educational outcomes, such as access to safe drinking water, reliable and affordable energy access, improved crop yield, and improved primary school test score.
The interventions distributed by D-Prize pilot organisations span across a broad range of solutions, including but not limited to solar panels, cancer screening, farm inputs, teaching curriculum and chlorine dispensers. The variety of pilot organisations chosen ensure a mix of positive health, energy, economic and educational outcomes.
See 3-4 of these pilots grow to serve 100,000 each within five years.
D-Prize projects 3 or 4 pilots from this grant cycle will scale to meaningful size, which they define as serving 100K people within five years. Collectively we expect the group to serve at least 300,000 beneficiaries in five years time.
