A Grant Funding Success! – The Power of Medl’s Story

It’s 6:02 PM. and you still haven’t left the office as yet.  At the top of the massive to-do list you haven’t even touched for the day is filling out your mother’s medical prescription. 💊  It’s you and you alone moms is depending on. You look out your office window to see bumper-to-bumper traffic 🚗 on the busy street below and you know right away you’re not making it to the pharmacy before it closes at 7:00 PM.

What better way to close our grant funding series than to show you how two Trini fellahs secured over US$270,000 in grant funding to launch an innovative medical platform that would solve this very problem?  At its core, grant funding seeks to create solutions that will have enormous social impact. Grant funding success, however, is marked by the ability to connect through stories just like this one.

Kiran Mohammed and his business partner Edward Inglefield realized that they had a challenge that 662 million other people in Latin America and the Caribbean had – caring for their relatives with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs). The only difference was, they had a solution. They called that solution Medl.

Medl is an end-to-end platform that connects doctors and patients with a pharmacy to dispense and deliver their medication. For the past 3 years, Kiran and Edward spent countless hours and resources trying to get the medical platform just right. They also started looking into grant funding almost immediately. But it was only in working with the IDB, Kiran said, that they truly understood what would differentiate Medl from other grant funding applicants for the IDB’s Covid-19 Challenge. Kiran said it was the story that led the folks at the IDB to select Medl over 500 established and start-up organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean to win the grant funding jackpot of US$120,000. 🌟

Since then, Medl has gone on to secure an  additional US$120,000 in grant funding from Microsoft and is in discussions with other grant funding agencies on their plans to take the medical platform to the rest of the  Caribbean and Latin America.

Medl had all the ingredients for a successful business, but the key to their grant funding success was in the story of how their platform would change the way people managed NCDs.

To get at your story, before you fill out that next funding application, ask yourself these questions:

• Does your idea have the potential not only to be viable and profitable, but also to improve the lives of others around you? If so, in what way does it accomplish this?   Does it perhaps solve a problem that people throughout the developing world are experiencing?
• Is the change you offer big enough to impact the community, the country or the region?
• Is your idea affordable and accessible to the vulnerable in society?
• And most important in expressing your story, what is the human element at the heart of your story?  This can be anything from the story of how you came up with your idea to what is unique about what you have to offer.

Answer all of these, my friend, and you’ll be one big step closer to grant funding success!