Co-payment are a requirement many donors have for their grantees when they submit a proposal. To have a co-payment in a proposal shows the commitment of the NGO and the beneficiaries and can convince a donor to fund your project. But how can you show it in your budget or your proposal that you will contribute from your side as well? Particularly if the contribution is not monetary? In this article, we are going to address these issues.
Once you have chosen the size of the co-payment you want to make in your project, you have to let the donor know. It is important to be very precise and clear here, because you do not want this information to get lost in the numbers.
When the donor has a template, they want you to fill out, many times they ask you for the total amount the project will cost and the amount you apply for. The difference between these two amounts is either money from other sources or your co-payment. Make sure that the donor knows which of the two it is and fill out the correct fields.
When you look at your budget, you can use a similar scheme. No matter how you organize your budget, at the bottom, you should have a line that states the total cost of the project you propose. Underneath, you can add a line to state the amount the co-payment mounts up to and on the very bottom the amount you apply for.
A co-payment does not always have to be monetary, it can be any other form of contribution as well. You need to be able to give it a monetary value though to show it to your donor in the budget. In the below example you can see the budget for a project to plant trees in the communal park. The co-payment consists of manpower and donated saplings. The manpower is quoted with the average daily wage for an unskilled laborer. The saplings are quoted at the price people would receive if they sold them in the open market. This way you can include a co-payment in your budget even if you or your beneficiaries are not able to invest money.
| Reforestation of the Communal Park | ||||
| Quantity | Unit | Price per Unit | Total | |
| Saplings | ||||
| Species A | 1000 | pieces | 10 | 10000 |
| Species B | 1000 | pieces | 15 | 15000 |
| Species C | 500 | pieces | 20 | 10000 |
| Tools | ||||
| Shovels | 50 | pieces | 50 | 2500 |
| Planters | 50 | pieces | 40 | 2000 |
| Pipe | 500 | m | 5 | 2500 |
| Manpower | ||||
| Unskilled labor | 20 | days | 20 | 400 |
| Skilled labor | 2 | days | 40 | 80 |
| TOTAL | 42480 | |||
| Co-payment (Saplings Species A and unskilled labor 10 people for 2 days; 20 days total) | 10400 | |||
| Amount applied for | 32080 | |||
Example: how to include nonmonetary co-payments in a budget (no currency included)
Think of creative ways to include contributions to your proposal. Does your accountant keep the books for the project? Does your driver transport goods? As long as the salaries for these people are paid through an outside source or your own funding and are not included in the budget you want to submit, all these actions can be counted as co-payments. Sometimes it makes sense to be even more clear and includes a line or two in the project description about how your co-payment is composed.
Eva is based in Germany and has worked for nearly a decade with NGOs on the grassroots level in Nepal in the field of capacity development and promotion of sustainable agricultural practices. Before that, she worked in South America and Europe with different organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in geography and her field of research was sustainability and inclusion in development projects.
