Giving Compass' Take:

• Candid and the Peace and Security Funders Group provide an overview of peace and security funding worldwide in 2016, the most recent data available. 

• This report notes a dearth of funding for peace and security, how can funders work together to fill the gaps? 

• Read an argument for funding peacemaking. 

Foundations support peace and security issues at varying funding levels. While the top 10 funders of peace and security accounted for 61 percent of all funding in the Index, 38 percent of funders awarded just one grant meeting peace and security criteria. This finding illustrates the approach to the research, which considers the relevance of each grant to peace and security regardless of whether the funder supports a dedicated program in this area. Further highlighting the diversity in funding levels, grant size ranged from less than $100 on the low end to the single largest grant of $15 million. The median grant amount for peace and security was $40,000. As in 2015, Carnegie Corporation of New York led the field of peace and security donors with $48.5 million in relevant grantmaking across 101 grants in 2016.

Policy and advocacy funding continues to grow and is the leading strategy among peace and security funders. In 2016, foundations directed 38 percent of their peace and security giving for policy and advocacy, a proportion that has grown steadily since 2012 when this strategy accounted for 16 percent of total funding. Within funding for policy, only 17 percent is focused at a global level, compared with 29 percent of overall peace and security funding. This suggests that funders are targeting their efforts to effect policy change at the state, national, or regional levels rather than focusing on global governance structures.

General support funding experienced a dip in 2016. Peace and security funders provided 14 percent of funding in the form of general support, slightly lower than the 16 percent of general support provided by U.S. foundations overall. Over the five years of data collected for the Peace and Security Index, the proportion of general support funding has ranged from 14–20 percent.

In 2016, the largest share of grantmaking (29 percent) focused on global activities. As in 2015, Sub-Saharan Africa and North America followed with 23 percent and 16 percent, respectively. These figures represent a grant's intended region of benefit, regardless of the recipient location.

For most regions, less than half of funding for peace and security is awarded to organizations based there. While the vast majority of peace and security funding focused on North America and Western Europe is awarded to recipient organizations in those very regions (98 and 70 percent, respectively), this is not the case elsewhere. Only 25 percent of peace and security funding for Asia and the Pacific is given directly to organizations based in those regions, while figures for the Middle East and North Africa (27 percent) and Sub-Saharan Africa (39 percent) are not much higher. In-region funding for Latin America hovers just under 50 percent. These findings are consistent with other research indicating that funding in support of local organizations is critical for effective peacebuilding, but represents a small proportion of grantmaking.