Partnerships for an Enabling Environment for Civil Society – Policy and Method Development

Please note: The deadline has been extended to Friday, August 7, at 11:59 a.m. CEST to compensate for the site's earlier downtime. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Sida welcomes applicants who spearhead efforts to protect and promote civic space worldwide; through work on policy and method development that contribute to an enabling environment and a strong independent civil society. 

An enabling environment refers to the conditions in which civic space is respected, protected and promoted,  allowing civil society actors to organise, operate, engage and contribute to development and democratic governance as independent actors in their own right.

Sida – the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency – is a government agency working to improve the living conditions of people living in poverty and under oppression in countries receiving official development assistance worldwide . Sida operates on behalf of the Swedish government and Parliament and the activities of the agency are funded through Swedish tax revenues.

UPDATE October 12 2026:

Thank you to all organisations that has showed interest in partnering with Sida.

Sida has received almost 300 applications. 

The selection process is ongoing and carried out in steps: 

Step 1: Confirmation that proposals are complete, meet the basic formal requirements and criteria set out in the call (including demonstrating an explicit link to Goal 2 in the CSO-strategy).

Step 2: Initial assessment and validation of relevance against the goal 2 of the CSO-strategy.

Step 3: Sida assesses applications from a portfolio perspective to ensure a composition that contributes to goal 2 of the CSO-strategy.

Step 4: In the final step selected proposals will be fully assessed following Sida’s general process for application appraisal.

All applicants that has been selected for Step 2 receives an email stating this during October. 

Please note that the selection for step 2 is not a commitment of funding. Organisation that are selcted for the next step in the process will recieve specific emails stating this. 

Feedback

Please note that due to the large number of proposals Sida is unable to provide candidates with individualised feedback to organisations that do not meet the basic requirements in step 1 and thus, do not qualify for step 2. However, Sida appreciates that feedback is important to help learn and develop, and have compiled the reasons for a proposal to not be selected for Step 2:

1. Incomplete proposal. In this call for proposals, Sida is only able to consider complete submissions, including all requested documents.
2. The basic requirements have not been met. In this call for proposals Sida has a number of minimum requirements outlined in the call, including that applicants must be a Not-for-profit civil society organization, not already have an agreement through the CSO-strategy, and have been in operation for 5 years etc. Sida is only able to consider organisations who meet all of the requirements (fully outlined in the call).
3. The proposed programme is not relevant to the CSO strategy, Goal 2, or is partly relevant but has scope that is broader than Goal 2. Sida has received a large number of high quality proposals, that are still declined because proposals have a broader scope than Goal 2 in the CSO-strategy. This is the most common reason for a proposal to not qualify for the next step.