In the competitive landscape of international development, accessing donor funding is both an art and a science. Whether you represent a small grassroots NGO or a large international consultancy, winning aid-funded contracts or grants requires not only technical expertise but also strategic foresight and careful planning. Having worked in this field for over three decades, I have witnessed organizations both succeed and fail depending on how well they understand the bidding process.
This article provides a practical, step-by-step guide to navigating the bidding process in international development. It also highlights how the tools and resources offered by DevelopmentAid can give your organization an edge at every stage.
#1. What is international aid and why do organizations have to bid?
International aid refers to the financial or technical assistance that is provided by governments, multilateral institutions (such as the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, the EU, or UN agencies), regional development banks (such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and private donors to address global challenges such as poverty reduction, humanitarian crises, infrastructure development, or governance reforms.
In 2023, global aid (Official Development Assistance (ODA)) from donors reached a record US$223.3 billion, with the United States, Germany, Japan, the UK, and France again being among the top five bilateral donors. Meanwhile, European Union institutions and Member States together provided around €82 billion, representing over 40% of global ODA, making the EU the largest single bloc of donors. ADB and other multilateral agencies also contributed significantly. ADB donated about US$3 billion in multilateral ODA from DAC sources, a significant which is disbursed via competitive tenders and grants.
Unlike charitable donations, aid funding is not given away freely. It is allocated via transparent bidding processes that are designed to ensure accountability and value for money.
Donors issue:
- Tenders: Procurement notices for services, works, or supplies
- Grants: Funding opportunities for programs and projects, typically aimed at NGOs, humanitarian actors, and civil society groups
In practice:
- Smaller NGOs often compete for local or regional grants, typically ranging from US$50,000 to US$500,000.
- Larger NGOs and consultancies pursue multi-million-dollar framework contracts or technical assistance projects that are funded by major donors such as the EU or the World Bank.
The playing field is technically open, but winning depends on preparation, networking, and a clear understanding of donor expectations.
Typical grant and tender sizes by donor type
#2. The core stages of the bidding process
Every bidding process can be broken down into four main stages:
- Opportunity identification and monitoring
- Bid preparation and team formation
- Proposal writing and submission
- Post-submission and follow-up
Each stage demands its own strategy and discipline.
4 Stages of the bidding process
🔹 Stage 1: Opportunity identification and monitoring
The first step involves knowing what’s out there. Calls for tenders and grants are published daily by donors, but keeping track is challenging, especially when opportunities appear in different formats and languages.
Key actions:
- Constant monitoring: Successful organizations don’t wait for opportunities to land in their inbox. They proactively monitor donor portals and platforms like DevelopmentAid, which aggregates thousands of opportunities worldwide.
- Forecasting: Forecast tenders allow early preparation. For example, EU tenders are often announced 3-12 months in advance, giving organizations a crucial advantage.
- Competitor analysis: Knowing your competition is as important as knowing the opportunity. DevelopmentAid allows you to review data on sanctioned organizations and analyze past contract awards, giving you insight into which firms are likely to bid again.
💡 Tip: Use DevelopmentAid’s tender statistics to identify which sectors or donors align best with your organization’s track record.
🔹 Stage 2: Bid preparation and team formation
Once an opportunity has been identified, the real work begins. Bid preparation is the most resource-intensive stage, and how you manage this often determines success.
Key actions:
- Maintain administrative readiness: Donors require updated financial audits, policies (anti-fraud, safeguarding, gender), and organizational registration. Many bids fail because these are outdated. Creating a ‘bid-ready’ compliance folder will save time.
- Build an expert database: Almost all projects require technical experts. DevelopmentAid’s CV database allows you to find professionals by sector, country, and donor experience, significantly reducing recruitment delays.
- Forge partnerships: Large projects are rarely won alone. The Call4Partners tool on DevelopmentAid enables organizations to publish or respond to partnership requests globally. A European consultancy, for example, might partner with an African NGO to strengthen local presence.
- Financial modeling: Budgeting is critical. For example, a World Bank consultancy contract worth US$2 million might allocate 60% to personnel, 20% to travel, and 20% to overheads. Benchmarking against past awards prevents under- or over-pricing.
- Use forecasting and risk analysis in bid planning: Leading organizations now go beyond budgeting by incorporating risk analysis into bid preparation. Inflation, political instability, and supply chain bottlenecks can derail even the best-designed projects. Forecasting tools, ranging from economic inflation indices to humanitarian early-warning systems, are increasingly relevant. For example, forecast-based action initiatives show how anticipating hazards enables better resource allocation before a crisis strikes. Applying similar forecasting to bids helps organizations to propose realistic timelines and resilient budgets.
- Apply reference class forecasting/benchmarking: Donors are wary of overly optimistic proposals. One way to counter this is reference class forecasting, where cost, duration, and overhead assumptions are benchmarked against past projects of similar size, geography, and donor. Research in project management demonstrates that this method reduces optimism bias and cost overruns. DevelopmentAid’s database of historical contract awards can serve as a practical tool for bidders to ground their assumptions.
💡 Tip: Start partnership discussions early. Many bids fail because local partners were contacted too late, leading to weak consortium arrangements.
Suggested timeline for bid preparation
🔹 Stage 3: Proposal writing and submission
Proposal writing is where strategy meets storytelling. A winning bid combines compliance, clarity, and persuasion, but increasingly also demonstrates innovation, adaptability, and safeguards.
Key actions:
- Follow the guidelines exactly: Donors are strict. If the call requests 30 pages in 12pt Times New Roman with a logframe annex, deviations risk immediate rejection. Even technically strong proposals can be disqualified on formatting or compliance issues.
- Write concisely and clearly: Avoid jargon. Replace vague terms such as “capacity-building synergies” with measurable actions like “training 200 teachers in XYZ curriculum.”
- Demonstrate innovation and adaptability: Many donors (especially the EU, the World Bank, and the EIB) now score bids on whether methodologies are not just sound but forward-looking. This includes showing adaptability to climate shocks, inflationary pressures, or supply chain risks. Highlight how your approach integrates resilience planning or scalable technology solutions.
- Embed inclusion, safeguards, and gender responsiveness: It is no longer sufficient to “add a section” on gender or social inclusion. Bidders must demonstrate how these principles have shaped the project design, delivery, and monitoring. For example, EU evaluations explicitly downgrade proposals that fail to explain how interventions avoid harm or reach marginalized groups.
- Build a knowledge base and reuse templates: Maintain an internal repository of past proposals, budget templates, CVs, and compliance documents. This reduces bid-preparation time and ensures consistency in quality. Ensure reuse is ethical and that sensitive donor-specific materials are anonymized.
- Engage with the donor: Many donors offer clarification periods. Asking well-prepared questions not only provides clarity but also signals professionalism and a genuine interest in aligning with donor priorities.
- Peer review and internal quality control: Share drafts internally or with partners. A fresh review often spots logical gaps or inconsistencies, misalignments with donor criteria, or budget inconsistencies that can otherwise sink a strong proposal.
💡 Tip: Use DevelopmentAid’s archive of past awards to study what types of approaches donors have funded in your sector. This helps to calibrate your narrative to match proven winning strategies while avoiding any pitfalls.
🔹 Stage 4: Post-submission and follow-up
The bidding journey does not end when you click “submit” or mail the completed proposal. In fact, what you do after submission may shape your long-term success rate, reputation, and positioning for the next opportunity.
Key actions:
- Track status: Evaluations can take weeks or even months. Assign responsibility to monitor donor communications and ensure no clarifications, interviews, or documentation requests are missed. Some portals (e.g., the EU’s Tenders Electronic Daily and the World Bank’s WBGeProcure RFx platform that is replacing eConsultant2) allow you to track the status in real-time.
- Prepare for negotiation: Shortlisted bidders may be asked to adjust budgets, clarify methodologies, or attend interviews. Ensure the proposal team remains mobilized until contract signature.
- Learn from feedback loops: Even rejections are valuable. Donors often provide evaluation scores or narrative feedback. Analyzing these helps to sharpen your approach. Systematically record this in your institutional database, compare with previous scores, and update templates to address any weaknesses. Over time, this builds an evidence-based approach to bid improvement.
- Monitor policy and procurement changes: Donor rules sometimes evolve even after submission. For example, USAID has cancelled or restructured solicitations mid-cycle, while the World Bank and EIB periodically issue procurement updates that affect eligibility, evaluation, or contract conditions. Monitoring these changes ensures your organization can quickly adapt or re-upload the required documents.
- Partnership and reputation management: Relationships extend beyond winning. Always thank partners and consortium members for their collaboration, regardless of the outcome. Follow up with donors politely to request a debrief if available. Maintaining a strong professional reputation often leads to future invitations, stronger partnerships, and donor trust.
- Build Institutional Memory: Document everything. Maintaining a database of past bids, partners, and feedback ensures lessons learned translate into better performance in future competitions. Record team composition, budget assumptions, donor communications, and evaluation results. Over time, this institutional knowledge will become a strategic asset and reduce learning curves for future tenders.
💡 Tip: DevelopmentAid’s tender analytics allow you to benchmark your success rate against sector averages.
#3. Practical tips for success
Common reasons for bid rejection
Winning bids is not just about writing good proposals. It’s about strategic positioning. Here are some valuable tips:
- Stay donor-centric: Always link your proposal to donor priorities. For example, the EU’s Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation instrument (NDICI) – Global Europe program emphasizes climate resilience. So, make sure your project explicitly addresses this. Proposals that demonstrate tangible contributions to this objective will score higher.
- Be ready to scale: Donors favor organizations that can mobilize quickly. Having pre-identified experts, framework agreements with suppliers, or scalable project modules demonstrates readiness.
- Mind the details: Small errors such as typos, inconsistent budgets, missing annexes can sink otherwise strong bids. Rigorous internal reviews are essential.
Invest in market research: Understanding the local political economy or donor funding trends can make the difference between a generic proposal and one that resonates. DevelopmentAid’s research team (research@developmentaid.org) can deliver tailored market insights to inform your strategy. - Network proactively: Attend donor info sessions, industry conferences, and webinars. Building visibility increases credibility so evaluators may be more receptive when your organization’s name appears in a proposal.
- Track trends: Donor priorities evolve. For example, over 25% of new donor-awarded contracts in 2022 explicitly integrated gender equality or climate change as cross-cutting themes. Aligning with these themes demonstrates awareness of funding trends. Under the EU’s NDICI-Global Europe regulation, at least 85% of new external actions must include gender equality as a principal or significant objective. Align your project’s gender and climate commitments accordingly.
- Scenario planning: Prepare multiple versions of your budget and technical proposal (e.g., one with higher cost assumptions, one leaner). Include optional or modular project components that can be scaled up or down depending on donor preferences, funding cuts, or negotiation outcomes.
- Use data and analytics to test hypotheses: Review past award data to identify where your organization has the highest win rates (by sector, geography, donor type). Use data such as past award notices under NDICI or EIB gender-lens project outcomes to benchmark which approaches actually succeed. Platforms like DevelopmentAid provide analytics that can guide resource allocation and improve bid/no-bid decisions.
- Invest in pre-bid partnerships & local capacity: Donors such as the World Bank increasingly prioritize local solutions and locally led development. Building relationships and capacity with local NGOs, SMEs, or institutions well before a call is announced gives a competitive advantage and strengthens credibility.
#4. How DevelopmentAid can provide your organization with a competitive edge
Throughout this article, you will have seen how DevelopmentAid supports every step of the bidding process. Beyond consolidating opportunities, the platform also provides analytics and benchmarking tools that help organizations to compete more strategically. Key features include:
- Tender and grant database: Monitor thousands of live opportunities globally and 1.3 millions of past tender and grants records in one place.
- Forecast tenders: Gain a head start by tracking upcoming calls, allowing you to allocate resources, staff and budgets before opportunities go public.
- CV Database: Recruit international and local experts efficiently and benchmark your staffing strength by comparing with how peers have structured similar bids.
- Call4Partners: Build stronger consortia by identifying partners early. Using the tool before opportunities go live allows partners to co-design proposals, rather than scrambling at the last minute.
- Sanctioned organization watch: Avoid reputational and legal risks by screening potential partners against global sanction lists.
- Tender statistics and analytics: Benchmark your performance against sector averages. Analytics can highlight which donors, regions, or sectors yield higher success rates, enabling you to refine strategy and make smarter bid selection.
Added value of DevelopmentAid tools
For consultancies, suppliers, and NGOs, these tools often mean the difference between submitting bids blindly and competing with confidence.
Where data brings a competitive advantage
Organizations increasingly use evidence-driven bidding strategies, and DevelopmentAid’s data can support this by answering practical questions such as:
- What is the average rejection rate by donor or region? (Helps to identify where to invest bid-writing energy)
- How long does it usually take from tender publication to contract award for EU, the World Bank, etc.? (Supports internal resource planning)
- What is the typical budget share that donors accept for overheads/administration? (Helps to calibrate pricing models)
- Are consortium bids with local partners more successful than solo bids? (Guides the partnership strategy)
- How much weight is now given to climate, inclusion, or ESG in technical evaluations? (Ensures proposals are designed with current donor priorities in mind)
💡 Takeaway: For consultancies, suppliers, and NGOs, these tools can mean the difference between bidding blindly and competing with confidence. Combining early intelligence (forecasts, partners) with analytics (success rates, donor trends) allows bidders not only to write better proposals but also to choose the right battles.
Final thoughts
Bidding for international development projects is not easy, but it is accessible to organizations of all sizes when approached systematically. By mastering the four stages of the bidding cycle and leveraging specialized tools like those offered by DevelopmentAid, your organization can increase its chances of success, expand its portfolio, and deliver greater impact on the ground.
If you want deeper insights into donor-specific market research, competitor analysis, or tailored sector studies, don’t hesitate to contact the DevelopmentAid research team at research@developmentaid.org.
After all, in this competitive field, knowledge is not just power: it means profit, partnerships, and progress.
