How to Write Activities and Work Plan in Your Grants Proposal

Activities :

Activities are the tasks we do, the service we provide or products we distribute to beneficiaries.

There is no specific objective for any project without activities associated with it. Activities are the interventions or events that are implemented in order to achieve the objective.

The number of these activities can be indefinite to achieve the specific project objective.

Activities that are designed to achieve every specific objective must be differentiated, so the donor will be able to know whether the planned activities are appropriate and achieve the objective or not.

When writing the activities, the present tense is used as in the following examples:
• Train 20 nurses (males/female) on infection prevention for 3 days.
• Conduct 150 direct awareness sessions in schools on hand washing.
• Hold 6 meetings with concerned parties of the project to clarify beneficiaries’ selection mechanism.
• Hold 3 workshops to introduce the project in the targeted districts, in the presence of local authority, active organizations and representatives of the private sector.
• Provide emergency medical services and maternal and child services through 3 mobile medical teams in the targeted districts.
• Rehabilitate 8 health facilities with a focus on water and sanitation facilities.
• Print 10 thousand awareness brochures containing health messages on hand washing at critical times.
• Sterilize 200 water resources with chlorine.
• Build 20 reservoirs for rainwater harvesting in the targeted villages.
• Form 10 committees of beneficiaries elected by the community and make sure that these committees are made up of men and women.
• Train 200 teachers (100 males – 100 female) on interactive teaching methods.

Suggested activities:

The activity is characterized by:

-      -  The activity always starts with present tense ( implement- train – rehabilitate- provide- establish- form )

-      - The activity is preferred to be (SMART) as the objective, so it should be clear, specific, measurable, applicable, relevant and time bound.

Writing the project activities is considered one of the difficult things faced by the proposal writer, and as we have been through these difficulties and know their importance for all proposal writers, we made a list of suggested activities in most of the project proposals.

This list contains the most important activities that were implemented by active organizations in different development and relief sectors. However, it must be noted that there are many other activities implemented in the same sectors. So, we hope that the project proposal writer learns more on the donors’ funding strategies, as well as the activities implemented by other organizations to learn all the new stuff from them. 

There may also be a change in the way many activities are implemented from one country to another, depending on the national contexts, the type of interventions (development or relief) and the standards set by the country's relief clusters or the Sphere Standards, which are updated periodically.

Work plan :

Note:

The Work plan of the proposal should contain answers for the following questions:

1-    What? What are the activities planned for implementation?

2-    When? The period of time in which activities are expected to be implemented.