Guest Post: On Following Grant-Proposal Instructions—A True Story

[The story below is from Edith Wakida, a grants officer at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Uganda. It comes from a discussion-forum message she wrote during the AuthorAID online course on writing grant proposals. Thank you, Edith! —Barbara]  

Reading instructions and following them to the dot is very important in proposal preparation.…

A brief experience: As research administrators, our work is to support the researchers, especially in complying with what the funders need. We had a researcher who thought he knew it all. The instructions for his proposal required a particular number of pages, but he had a lot to write. We asked him to reduce the pages, as we knew that exceeding the page limit would result in rejection, but he refused to heed advice.

We went ahead with the submission process, which was electronic, and thank God he was there when we were submitting the proposal. He saw the rejection message upfront. The issue was not following the required number of pages.

This researcher learned the hard way. He quickly condensed his work to the required number of pages, and the proposal was accepted. Thankfully, he had enough time before the submission deadline to correct the problem. If he had insisted and left, his proposal would have flopped.

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[Note: The online course on writing grant proposals, which just ended, was developed and facilitated by INASP Associate Ravi Murugesan. It was based on materials from face-to-face AuthorAID workshops. These materials are available in the AuthorAID Resource Library.

“This is our fifth online course on AuthorAID Moodle but our first online course in writing grant proposals,” Ravi notes. “To select participants for our online courses, we sometimes put out a call for applications on the AuthorAID website, and sometimes we directly invite people in our network who meet certain criteria.”

The online course on writing grant proposals was for women from developing countries. In total, 35 women, from 16 countries, took this course.]