Ms Gina McIntyre:

Yes, we are very transparent in that regard. This, too, was an issue we tried to address in this programme with the pre-development support. A lot of organisations went through a lot of work and pain to make an application only to find out they were not even relevant, and we felt very sorry for them. In other cases, they missed the mark in some regard, perhaps because they did not include enough about peacebuilding and focused too much on sports, for example. That is the whole purpose of the pre-development support. We have a person who will engage with them. They give us a two-page concept note outlining a brief idea of their project, and we can then advise them as to whether this is or is not for them, whether it should be submitted in respect of another fund or area and what they need to do, and that is what we have been doing with that and through the workshops to try to give people one-to-one advice.

So far, what we are seeing from the applications and the calls that are opened is that there are a huge number of very good applications, and our problem is going to be that people who have really good projects will be turned down because we just do not have the money or the budget remaining to allocate it all. There is an appeals process, but that focuses on cases where there has been a fundamental process error or an ridiculously unreasonable decision.