GIZ: Designing and running a €1M export grant programme for Ukrainian MSMEs

GIZ, which implements German development cooperation in Ukraine. The programme was announced by the European Union and Germany as €1 million in grants for 100 Ukrainian enterprises. 

Domestic consumption fell by roughly 30% in the second quarter of 2022. For many Ukrainian manufacturers the route back to viability ran through export markets they had never entered, and that shift needed capital. But a grant programme is easy to announce and hard to run well: the difficulty is not handing out money, it is defending the choice of who receives it – and then making sure the money turns into something.

Key challenges:

• Demand at home had collapsed, so survival depended on export capability most applicants had yet to build
• Competition ran at more than eight eligible applications per available grant, so selection had to be auditable rather than editorial
• €1 million had to reach micro and small firms under donor due-diligence and KYC standards, in grants of €10,000
• The full cycle had to run twice inside ten months, leaving each grantee under two months to implement

Our team designed and ran it end to end – criteria, calls, evaluation, contracting, disbursement and monitoring.

1. Phase I: Programme design. We built the selection methodology, eligibility rules and evaluation criteria, migrated the application to the Accelerator App platform, and ran a tender to appoint independent experts for substantive assessment. A dedicated programme site, an FAQ and a national communication campaign went live before the first call opened.
2. Phase II: Two selection waves. 1,128 applications arrived across the two waves and 824 passed technical assessment. Independent experts shortlisted 140 of them on export and innovation potential, from which 100 grantees were selected. What separated a winning application from a merely eligible one was published openly during the programme.
3. Phase III: Disbursement and follow-through. All 100 grantees signed agreements, received the full grant amount and completed their projects. We replaced the usual document exchange – up to ten files per company – with a single form that generated every document automatically into a per-grantee folder, leaving one table to verify. Ten written success stories and three videos were produced and published.

The programme placed €1 million with 100 enterprises drawn from 1,128 applications. Every indicator was met or exceeded: 140 applications shortlisted, 100 agreements signed, 100 grants disbursed and used.

The team established group chats for 24/7 support of grantees, conducted introductory calls lasting 3+ hours, and created a Notion database containing all essential information for grantees. Overall, the participants highly valued their experience in the grant program, with an average score of 4.87/5.

On the outcomes grantees reported, 68% recorded increased sales, 51% increased income, 47% higher labour productivity and 44% larger production volumes. Efficiency followed at a distance: 34% reduced total costs, 24% reduced production costs and 16% improved energy efficiency.

• Give strong applicants a second lap. The two waves overlapped, which risked losing good first-wave applicants who had just missed selection. Rather than absorb that, we gave them a week to revise and resubmit. Twenty-one of the second-wave winners came from that group – a fifth of the final cohort, recovered from applications that had already been written once.
• Under two months is not long enough to show a result. The most common request from grantees was more implementation time. A company that spends its grant obtaining EU certification holds a certificate when the programme closes; the export contracts and the revenue arrive months later, after reporting has ended. Programmes that stop measuring at the deadline systematically understate themselves.