Rising to the Occasion: Our Learnings from the Rapid Response Funding Initiative

 By Rahul Bhide, Rohan Vyavaharkar, Mahesh Krishnamurthy, Raahil Rai

COVID-19 represents one of the biggest challenges that humanity has ever faced. All over the world, governments, communities, donors, and investors are coming together to respond to these challenges. And it is the most vulnerable - the poor, those with chronic health issues, and the elderly who are most at risk from the pandemic. Omidyar Network India's focus segment is the Next Half Billion (NHB), the people in the bottom 60% of India's income distribution - migrants, daily wage earners, gig-economy workers, and small businesses. Given the massive ongoing impact on our target customer base, Omidyar Network India was obliged to help. 

There are surveys showing that about 80% of non-profits have mobilised to respond to the pandemic, in many cases, being the first responders along with the government. However, there is no macro picture of the range and scale of these initiatives. Our analysis of the 2000-plus funding proposals received under RRFI can serve as a proxy indicator. We also wanted to share our learnings as a funder of this program. We hope this analysis can bring greater data and insight to the stories of effort and impact all of us have heard.

We hope this report will be useful for non-profit organisations, our fellow funders, the government, and interested observers. We also wanted to highlight some of the incredible impact that the organizations supported under RRFI had, with the hope that others may choose to collaborate with or fund them.

You can download the report as a PDF here.