The Power of Nutrition: New Grant and Investment Management System

The Client

The Power of Nutrition is an independent charitable foundation established in 2015 to catalyse greater investment in nutrition programmes and transform children’s futures on a scale that few can achieve alone.  It works in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa through a matched-financing mechanism that brings together platform funders (eg DfID), private investors (eg foundations, high net worth individuals) and implementing partners (international NGOs).  A small organisation, employing 20-30 staff, it has processed over $500M in grants to date.

The Challenge

The Power of Nutrition is currently increasing the number of investments in its portfolio to achieve its strategic goal of $1Bn of grant programmes.  As the number of investments increases, the development and management of the portfolio and individual investments is increasingly becoming laborious. This requires a more efficient and streamlined processes/system to manage the development and management process for investments.

The Power of Nutrition held a procurement process in the Spring of 2020 (during lockdown) and Intouch’s solution based around ProGrant was selected. Requirement workshops were devised to be held remotely over Microsoft Teams utilizing various collaboration tools such as Microsoft Whiteboard to help with requirements clarification and elicitation. The system is expected to go-live March 2021

Our Solution

Intouch’s ProGrant Grant Management System is the system chosen by The Power of Nutrition to manage and support this increasing complex process.  ProGrant is a cloud-based solution, built using the latest Microsoft technologies, that allows The Power of Nutrition to:

  • manage the end-to-end investment development process using a simple and flexible workflow tool to define and manage all various types of key tasks, milestones, risks and issues
  • supplement these with accompanying documentation and sign-offs as part of the approval process
  • plan the investment cycle from  initiation and design through to implementation by the chosen partner
  • provide a comprehensive financial picture of the complete portfolio – investors, investments, matched funds, payments from investors and to implementing partners
  • conduct regular reviews of partner performance
  • report accurately on that performance to investors and funders
  • define, collect and analyse specific monitoring and evaluation (M&E) indicators to determine the real outcomes and impact of the investments on the children supported by them
  • incorporate lessons learnt from past performance to improve future outcomes
  • monitor and track programmes at individual project, budget and payment levels
  • extend the use of the system to implementing partners for direct, timely data input

The Benefits

  • full support of the complete, end-to-end investment development process
  • flexible workflow allowing the idiosyncrasies of each investment to be incorporated
  • complete programme planning and monitoring – tasks, milestones, reminders, sign-offs
  • automatic generation of key reporting – M&E, investors, internal
  • comprehensive portfolio and financial tracking across all investments and the projects/budgets/payments within them
  • risk management and mitigation at both investment and portfolio level