Partnerships
The Best Early-Career Talent
Is Not In Your Pipeline.
She is twenty-two years old. Corrugated roof. Chalk dust in the light. She is holding a classroom together because the last teacher left and nobody replaced her. Before her twenty-third birthday she has run a project, managed a team of volunteers, held a budget, and rescued a supply chain that arrived three days late and half short.
She has no network. No referral. No alumni association. Nothing on paper that any screening system you own knows how to read. Your assessment centre has no way to find her.
We already have.
Trusted By Partners
1.2M+
Changemakers Served
In the last twelve months
152
Countries
Where changemakers take action
250+
Communities
Reached across the world
500+
Hours Of Training
Assessed, verified and tracked
In the last twelve months World Merit served 1.2M+ changemakers across 152 countries and 250+ communities. Every one of them has moved through over 500 hours of assessed training: crowdfunding, institutional grant writing, volunteer recruitment, project management, data analytics, leadership. We know how they perform under load, because we have watched them do it in conditions no assessment centre can simulate.
Start Where Your Problem Is
Tell Us What
You Are Solving.
Hiring in emerging markets is slow, expensive and noisy.
Talent and Pipeline →
Your global offices feel like separate companies and engagement is flat.
Employee Volunteering →
You need employability outcomes your accreditors will accept.
University Partnerships →
You have ESG or foundation capital and no intervention with a countable outcome.
Sponsorship and Institutional Funding →
You want standing in a market before you have an office there.
Cohort Sponsorship →
The Floor
Partnerships Begin
At $5,000.
We publish our floor because you deserve to know it before you spend a meeting finding out. Below $5,000, the real costs of doing this properly consume so much of the gift that we cannot promise you an outcome.
$5,000 sponsors five young people through a full four-month internship. Five first jobs. Five reference letters. Five CVs that stop being empty. You will know their names. You will read what they built. That is the smallest thing we sell. There is nothing small about it.
Fourteen Ways To Work With Us
Every Route
Has A Price And A Reason.
Every route below carries what it costs, how it runs, and why partners choose it. Most combine two or three. If none of them fit, tell us, and we will build the one that does.
I. Talent And Pipeline
From $10,000 per year
Corporate Talent Pipeline Access
How it runs
You define the markets, functions and volumes you hire into. We screen, train, assess against your competency framework and shortlist before anyone reaches your recruiters. Every dossier carries real project evidence: what she built, what it cost, what broke, what she did about it. No placement fee. No exclusivity clause.
Why partners choose it
In these markets the CV is close to a worthless signal, and every company hiring there is paying a fortune to learn that slowly. We have spent 500 hours with each of these people. We know who finishes things and who leads when nobody asks her to. Somewhere in your first shortlist is the person who will run your regional business in fifteen years. Right now she cannot get an interview.
Our red line: we never charge the candidate. Not an application fee, not a training fee, not a placement fee, not a deposit, not ever.
From $10,000 per year
University Partnerships
How it runs
Experiential placements for your enrolled students, remote and in-country, credit-bearing or delivered alongside the curriculum. Your career services team receives placement rates, employability outcomes, competency mapping, supervisor assessments, student reflective artefacts and alumni destination data, formatted to survive an accreditation review.
Why partners choose it
Rankings bodies, accreditors and fee-paying families have stopped accepting simulations as evidence of employability. We offer real placements at real organisations, solving problems with real consequences, at a cost per student no in-house programme can approach.
From $5,000 for five interns
Intern Sponsorship At Volume
How it runs
$1,000 funds one intern for four full months: stipend, supervision, mentorship, live project work and formal assessment. Sponsor in blocks, restrict by country or discipline, interview them at the end if you want to. You are never obliged to hire.
Why partners choose it
It is the cleanest unit of impact we have. One number, one person, one outcome with a face attached. For most of these young people the barrier was never talent. It was that nobody would give them the first job, and every job after the first one asks what you did before it. $1,000 is the entire difference between a CV that opens doors for thirty years and one that stays blank.
II. Sponsorship And Named Programmes
From $25,000
Corporate Cohort Sponsorship
How it runs
A named cohort of World Merit fellows in your priority markets, built to your specification: sector, geography, discipline, gender balance. Your brand across the programme, a full impact dataset, quarterly reporting, content and media rights, and direct access to the fellows.
Why partners choose it
One budget line solves three problems: a hiring pool grown to your specification, genuine standing in a market before your first office opens, and a year of authentic content plus a dataset that communications and ESG can both use. A young leader trained and paid through your partnership will talk about your company for the rest of her working life. You cannot buy that. You can only earn it.
From $15,000 per track
Named Curriculum Track Sponsorship
How it runs
You fund, co-brand and help shape one track inside our 500 hours: data analytics, financial literacy, grant writing, project management, digital skills, leadership. Your specialists teach into it, and every learner carries your certification alongside ours.
Why partners choose it
Category ownership that compounds quietly for years. A bank owns financial literacy. A cloud provider owns data analytics. Thousands of young professionals learn the discipline your industry runs on, with your name on the page they learned it from.
From $20,000
Public Health And Crisis Education
How it runs
You fund our health education programme in schools across Africa, where our team teaches children what Ebola actually is. How it moves. Why you do not touch. Why you do not wash the body. Who to tell, and how fast. Funding covers trainers, materials, translation, school partnerships and monitoring.
Why partners choose it
There is nothing abstract about the outcome. It is a nine-year-old who says no when her family reaches out to help a sick neighbour, and who sends someone running for a clinic on day one instead of day six. That is the difference between a village losing one person and losing twenty.
From $10,000
Rapid Response Fund
How it runs
You commit capital in advance and we hold it ready. When a flood, outbreak or displacement crisis hits a country where we already have trained leaders, funds release within 72 hours to the people already standing in it. You are notified at deployment and receive a full account of where every pound landed.
Why partners choose it
The honest problem with disaster giving is timing. The money arrives in week three. The deaths happen in week one. Pre-commitment takes your approval chain off the critical path entirely.
From $25,000
Summit, Delegation And Advocacy
How it runs
Fund youth delegations to international forums, including United Nations processes where our changemakers have already stood and held world leaders to account. Covers travel, visas, preparation, advocacy training and delegation support.
Why partners choose it
Visibility with policymakers, and something more durable: a real relationship with the young people who will write and enforce the regulation your industry lives under in fifteen years.
III. Institutional And Grant Funding
Scoped to your programme
Workforce And Education Foundations
How it runs
You fund the core pipeline as an education-to-employment intervention. We provide a full logic model, baseline and endline measurement, control comparison where sound, longitudinal employment tracking and independent verification. Reporting is built to your framework, not ours.
Why partners choose it
Very few youth interventions can name a countable terminal outcome. Ours can: employed, self-employed, or funded to run her own organisation. That is a rare line in a grant report, and it is why this is the route most programme officers champion internally.
Scoped to your programme
Cultural Exchange And Bilateral Funders
How it runs
The exchange component, packaged for funders whose mandate is cross-border understanding: British Council, Erasmus+, Commonwealth programmes, embassy and consulate schemes, bilateral cultural funds. Cross-border cohorts, reciprocal placements, paired-country projects, and reporting aligned to mutual-benefit objectives.
Why partners choose it
Exchange funding demands genuine two-way benefit, and most applicants can only evidence one direction of travel. We can evidence both: what the visiting fellow gained, and what the host community gained from having her.
From $250,000 across three to five years
Multi-Year Strategic Partnership
How it runs
A custom programme with joint governance, a shared roadmap, a dedicated World Merit team, co-designed measurement and named senior contacts on both sides. Typically blends cohort sponsorship, pipeline access, employee volunteering and in-kind support under a single agreement.
Why partners choose it
Everything meaningful in this work compounds, and annual funding cycles cut the compounding off at the knees. Five years is long enough to follow one young woman from her first training module to the organisation she runs with staff of her own, in the town she grew up in.
IV. Your People: Volunteering In 100+ Countries
Skills-based mentoring
One employee, one young leader, one hour a fortnight for six months. Matched by discipline and supported throughout.
Expert masterclasses
Your specialists teach live into our curriculum. Recorded once, used for years.
Grant-writing and pitch clinics
Your teams sit with fellows preparing real applications and give real feedback on documents with real money attached.
Team challenge days
A department takes a live problem from a partner community and works it for a day with the fellows in the room.
In-market volunteering
Where your offices and our programmes overlap: classroom support, careers days, infrastructure work, health education.
Language and interview partners
Thirty minutes of conversation practice or mock interviewing measurably changes a young person's employment odds.
Executive and board mentorship
Senior leaders paired with alumni now running their own organisations. Six-month commitment.
V. Beyond Cash
Value-matched, from $5,000
In-Kind And Technology Partnership
Licences, cloud credits, devices, connectivity, learning platforms, translation, legal counsel, design, logistics. A working laptop and a reliable connection are the entire difference between capability and exclusion.
From $5,000 per year
Matched And Payroll Giving
Our internships cost exactly $1,000, which makes them an unusually good payroll giving product. An employee funds a share, the company matches, and an office sponsors one whole named human being.
Scoped to your requirement
Procurement And Supplier Partnership
Buy from the social enterprises our alumni build and run: catering, textiles, agriculture, digital services, translation, creative work. It is a purchase order, not charity, and it satisfies supplier diversity commitments honestly.
What Every Partner Gets
At Every
Level.
A named relationship manager
Quarterly reporting on outcomes, not activity
Full safeguarding, due diligence and compliance documentation
Agreed brand usage and content rights
Direct access to fellows
An annual review that reports what underperformed alongside what worked
Financial transparency down to programme level
Four Things We Will Never Do
We Would Rather Lose
The Partnership Than These.
Never charge a young person for access
Talent is distributed evenly across the world. Money is not. This entire organisation exists inside that one sentence.
Never place a fellow into unsafe work
Regardless of who is funding it.
Never sell a story we cannot evidence
When something underperforms it goes in your report. The partners we have held longest are the ones we brought bad news to early.
Never let a logo override a community's judgement
Your branding is welcome. Direction is not for sale.
How It Starts
Three Steps
To A Partnership.
01
One conversation
Thirty minutes. Tell us what you are actually trying to solve: hiring, retention, market entry, ESG, or the thing you have not been able to name yet.
02
A costed proposal
Within ten working days, including the outcomes we will be measured against, and the ones we will not promise you.
03
Pilot, then scale
Most partners begin at $5,000 with five interns and one volunteering activity, then grow once they have seen the reporting land.
What We Are Really
Asking You For.
Tonight, in a room with an unreliable light, a young woman is closing a laptop having just finished the last module of a course she was never supposed to be able to take. She has the training. She has the plan. What she does not have is someone deciding she is worth a first chance.
That decision costs $5,000. It has five names attached to it.
