Gidraf Wachira

Grants management support for a 70-organisation portfolio

The EPIC Air Quality Fund is onboarding 39 new awardees and growing to 70 organisations in 44 countries. I've spent six years running awardee portfolios across Africa and Asia: onboarding, agreements, invoices, reporting and the playbooks behind them. This page shows how I'd carry that load from week one.

Available about 20 days a month, inside your 12:00–16:30 CET core hours (14:00–18:30 in Nairobi).

See my playbook Try the tracker See the scope of work, mapped

My grantmaking in numbers, NetHope

Awardees
23
Portfolio in 2 years
$3M
Per grant
$40,000–100,000
Grant period
12–18 months
LMIC countries
7
  • Kenya
  • Uganda
  • Nigeria
  • Mali
  • Philippines
  • Nepal
  • Bangladesh

My onboarding and continuous support playbook

How I take an awardee from signed agreement to final impact story, and what each step achieves. The two steps marked as proposals are additions I'd suggest for the EPIC Air Quality Fund cohort.

  1. Grant agreement drafting, review and signing

    Achieves: clear, shared expectations before any money moves.

    • Proposed work plan with clear milestones. I prefer milestone-based tranche payments to time-based ones.
    • Primary and secondary project contacts documented.
    • Reporting frequency documented and reporting template shared.
    • Data and data-sharing requirements documented, with any other requirements of the fund.

  2. Kick-off meeting

    Achieves: an agreed work plan and calendar that I can track from day one.

    • Discuss the fund's expectations and requirements.
    • Agree a high-level work plan with milestones. This is the plan I track in the project management tool, such as Asana.
    • Agree reporting and invoicing timelines, also tracked in the tool.
    • Meet the primary and secondary contacts.
    • Schedule quarterly check-ins, or whatever rhythm is feasible for the team.
    • Share the risk and lessons-learned matrix template. The team records positive and negative lessons, and the matrix becomes part of every check-in agenda.

  3. Cohort orientation sessionProposed for EPIC

    Achieves: one cohort that knows each other and hears the same rules once.

    • Held just after all awardees have signed their grant agreements.
    • Cohort members get to know each other.
    • Fund-wide requirements and expectations are shared with everyone at once.

  4. Quarterly check-ins

    Achieves: problems surface early, in an informal conversation rather than a late report.

    • Review progress against the work plan.
    • Review risks and lessons learned, and act on any recommendations.
    • Review or collect data for M&E, communications and reporting.

  5. Semi-annual progress info sessionProposed for EPIC

    Achieves: awardees learn from each other, not only from the Fund.

    • Awardees share learnings and challenges.
    • Peers exchange ideas across countries.

  6. Interim reports

    Achieves: payments tied to verified progress.

    • Review for accuracy and completeness.
    • Request the invoice once the report is approved.

  7. Final report

    Achieves: a clean close-out, and results that travel beyond the grant.

    • Review for accuracy and completeness.
    • Request the final invoice after the report is approved.
    • Awardee presents their impact at a working group, community of practice, conference or summit.
    • Write the impact story with the awardee and the communications and M&E teams.

Your scope of work, mapped to what I've done

Each workstream from the terms of reference, with the closest work I've already delivered. The left column is your wording, shortened.

1New awardee onboarding

  • Kick-off meetings, support meetings and orientation for the 2026 cohort
  • Grant agreements and invoices with EPIC and UChicago admin offices
  • Invoice review against award terms; contract maintenance
  • Onboarded 23 awardees across 7 countries at NetHope: agreements, invoices and orientation, with 100% adherence to award terms and donor, legal and regulatory requirements.
  • Ran a kick-off meeting with every awardee covering the agreement, expectations and named contacts, then quarterly check-ins to review progress and risk.
  • Drafted and negotiated grant contracts and routed them to the Chief Administrative Officer for approval.
  • Reviewed invoices for each grant tranche against award terms. Earlier, at Mezzanineware, processed invoices for 15+ farmer organisations against deliverable milestones with 100% financial accuracy.

2Portfolio administration and communications

  • Shared inbox and routine correspondence across 70 organisations
  • Reporting deadlines, narrative and financial reports, escalation
  • AirWatch newsletter content
  • Awardee webinars and networking events
  • Interim and 18-month report review; renewal background material
  • Tracked every reporting and milestone date in Asana and contacted each awardee a month before interim and final reports were due.
  • Spotted delays early and drafted no-cost extensions for approval rather than letting deadlines slip.
  • Reviewed semi-annual and final reports for completeness against the grant agreement and followed up with awardees on gaps.
  • Planned webinars, working-group sessions and summit plenaries where awardees shared lessons. Wrote blogs, case studies and impact stories.
  • Prepared initial assessments and background material for renewals, informing decisions. Retained 100% of awardees.

3Documentation and systems

  • Master tracker of award, invoice, reporting, renewal and end dates
  • Awardee Onboarding Playbook that outlasts the contract
  • FAQs, templates and standard-response libraries
  • Workflow and tool improvements as the portfolio scales
  • Built a master tracker with a project per awardee: report dates, milestones, invoice dates and check-ins. It cut project bottlenecks by 15%.
  • Wrote, tested and maintained a grantmaking playbook covering the whole cycle: call for proposals, info sessions, review, contracting, awardee management, risk, invoices and close-out.
  • Created the templates behind it: proposal review, interim and final reports, invoices, Asana project, communication assets, MEL data collection, plus FAQs. Grant review time fell by 50%.
  • Kept risk and lessons-learned matrices so the playbook improved with each round.

4Monitoring, evaluation and analysis support

  • Data collection, cleaning and follow-up to close gaps
  • Portfolio reporting and awardee impact summaries
  • Background research on awardees
  • Supported M&E colleagues with collection, cleaning and follow-up across 9,500+ community submissions and 1,752 climate-risk reports in Nigeria and Uganda.
  • Led portfolio reporting to senior management and donors, and turned awardee results into impact stories.
  • Ran due diligence and background research on awardees for the review committee, and on 30+ agribusinesses and financial providers at Mezzanineware.

5Other Fund support

  • Conference logistics, briefing preparation, internal coordination
  • Presented awardee case studies and prepared briefings for COP28, COP29, the CBA19 conference in Brazil, the ICT4D conference in Ghana and the NetHope Global Summit.
  • Organised three executive field trips for funders' senior management at Mezzanineware.
Technical skills and knowledge you listed
Microsoft Office and project toolsBuilt budget-vs-actual models in Excel with variance analysis across the $1.5M+ portfolio. Daily use of Asana, Monday.com, Trello, Salesforce, Power BI and Google Workspace.
Data organisation and light analysisCleaned and validated multi-country survey datasets in Excel. The tracker below exports to CSV for exactly this reason.
AI used appropriately and ethicallyDrafting templates, summarising proposals and synthesising reports, with clear limits. See how below.
Supporting awardees in a portfolio25+ grantee organisations supported from call for proposals to close-out.
Organisations in low- and middle-income countriesGrantees in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Mali, the Philippines, Nepal and Bangladesh. Partners in Tanzania, Rwanda and Benin.
Newsletters, webinars, external communicationsBlogs, case studies, webinars and conference panels. Contributor and peer reviewer for a 2026 ITU, WMO, UNDRR and IFRC report on AI for early warning.
Background in development and philanthropyTwelve years in digital agriculture, health finance and climate programmes, the last six in grantmaking.
Self-directed across many workstreamsRemote since 2020, across CET, CST and EST core hours.

Your grantmaking principles, and how I've worked

Four of the Fund's published principles, each next to how I've run grants in practice.

Fund in-country ownership and global collaboration

Awardees are in-country actors who own their data, and that data feeds global systems.

My portfolios funded community-based organisations directly, then connected them through working groups, learning forums and global summits.

Fund flexibly

No caps on operating costs, and budgets that can move between lines as needs change.

I ran flexible grants and used no-cost extensions to keep projects on track when reality changed, instead of penalising awardees for it.

Fund for the long term

18-month awards, renewable up to twice.

Renewals are where good records matter most. I'd make sure every renewal brief draws on 18 months of clean tracker data.

Fund where others don't yet

Capable local actors in countries that receive little clean-air funding.

My whole career has been with local organisations in places donors overlook, from Tana River County to Yumbe District.

Master awardee tracker, working sample

Key dates across the award cycle, turned into the next action for the team. Fictional awardees, dated relative to today.

AwardeeNext milestoneDue18-month awardAction
Done Overdue Due within 30 days Scheduled Today
In the role I'd build this in Excel or your existing tool. The logic is the same.

Standard-response library, working sample

With 70 organisations writing in, most emails will be variations on a dozen questions. A shared library keeps answers fast, consistent and still personal. Search it, pick one, copy it.

    How I use AI, and where I stop it

    You asked for comfort using AI appropriately and ethically to streamline repetitive work. That means it handles first drafts and checking, while people make every judgement.

    TaskAI doesI doNever handed to AI
    Report completeness checks Compares a narrative report to the reporting template and lists missing or thin sections. Read the report myself, confirm each gap, write the follow-up. Any view on awardee performance or standing.
    Awardee correspondence Drafts from the response library; first-pass French, Spanish or Portuguese for awardees who prefer them. Edit tone and facts for each awardee; have important translations checked by a fluent speaker. Sending anything without a human read.
    Background research Summarises public information on an organisation, with links to sources. Check every fact against its source before it enters a brief. Unverified claims in renewal or onboarding material.
    Tracker and data cleaning Writes Excel formulas; flags duplicates, impossible dates and outliers. Spot-check results and fix the source data. Invoice approval or payment decisions.
    Newsletter and impact summaries Condenses awardee updates into short AirWatch drafts. Confirm wording with the awardee before publication. Quotes or results the awardee hasn't approved.

    Ground rules

    Use only the AI tools the University of Chicago approves, under its data policies.

    Keep banking details, personal data and confidential financials out of AI tools that aren't approved for them.

    A person makes every determination on payments, performance and renewals.

    Say when AI helped, if anyone asks.

    How this page was made

    I built this site with Claude, an AI assistant, in one working session. I gave it your scope of work, my CV, my application answers and my existing portfolio. It drafted the structure, the code and the tracker logic. I supplied every fact and checked every claim. That's the split I'd use on the job: AI takes the repetitive build, and I stay accountable for what goes out.

    Background

    • 2023–2026
      Global Climate Intersections LeadNetHope, remote

      Directed grant management for a $1.5M+ annual climate portfolio: 23 awardees in 7 countries, 100% donor compliance, 95%+ budget adherence.

    • 2020–2023
      Programme Manager, Connected FarmerMezzanineware (Vodacom Group), remote

      15+ partner organisations and 250,000+ farmers across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Secured $2M+ in continued programme investment.

    • 2019–2020
      Country Manager, Agri-wallet RwandaDodore Limited, Kigali

      Built country operations from scratch, with trackers, checklists and SOPs for partner management.

    • 2014–2019
      Programme Manager and Business DevelopmentDodore Limited, Nairobi

      Agri-wallet and the M-Tiba digital health finance pilot.

    Countries I've worked with

    • Kenya
    • Uganda
    • Nigeria
    • Mali
    • Tanzania
    • Rwanda
    • Benin
    • Philippines
    • Nepal
    • Bangladesh

    Credentials

    • PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner
    • Climatebase Fellow, Cohort 9 (2026)
    • YALI East Africa Fellow (2017)
    • Certified Carbon Management Leader, in progress
    • BBA, Makerere University
    • English and Swahili

    Selected work

    Draft

    Filled from the response library. Edit before sending.