International Grantmaking: funding organisations outside your own country

What is international grantmaking?

International grantmaking is funding organisations in countries other than the funder's own. It covers a corporate foundation supporting community projects where the company operates, a research funder backing teams abroad, and a private foundation granting to partners overseas.

The programme logic is the same as a domestic one. What changes is that every assumption a domestic process rests on, that the recipient's legal status can be checked in a familiar register, that the amount means the same thing on both sides, that reviewers can read the application, has to be re-established.

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What makes it different from domestic grantmaking?

Four things, and they compound.

Verification, because the recipient has no equivalent of a domestic registration a funder can look up, so due diligence takes longer and depends on documents in another format.

Currency, because a grant agreed in one currency and spent in another produces different figures depending on which date sets the rate, and someone carries that risk whether or not it was ever discussed.

Language, both in the application and in the reporting that follows. And time, because processing, banking and reporting calendars in the partner's country rarely match the funder's.

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The two routes for a US private foundation

United States tax law offers a specific choice, and it is worth naming because a great deal of published guidance on international grantmaking is written from that perspective and does not always say so.

An equivalency determination establishes that the foreign grantee would qualify as a US public charity, which front-loads the work and then allows the grant to be treated much like a domestic one. Expenditure responsibility is lighter to begin and carries obligations for the life of the grant, including grantee reports and disclosure on the foundation's return.

Funders in other jurisdictions face their own cross-border requirements, which differ in both substance and documentation. A European funder reading US guidance should not assume the framework transfers.

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Running international grants in a platform

A grant management software platform holds the verification file against the grantee record so a second grant to the same partner starts from the existing evidence, records amounts in both the grantee's currency and the funder's, and localises the form and criteria for each language a call accepts.

It also keeps grantee reporting comparable across countries, which is what allows a portfolio spanning fifteen jurisdictions to be reported as one programme rather than fifteen.