When Andrew Cachia lost out on a €15,000 grant as a first-time buyer of a property within an Urban Conservation Area (UCA), the experience left him with more than just disappointment – it gave him the spark for a new project.

“I was promised a number of grants, subsidies and incentives that would help ease the journey,” Mr Cachia said in a LinkedIn post. Yet navigating the process proved far more complex than expected. “I tried looking for information online and calling the Government help centres. Unfortunately, the landscape is so confusing, with so many overlapping grants across different entities, that I got met with misleading information, which resulted in me applying for the wrong grants. By the time I realised, the door had closed.”

Out of that frustration, Grants.mt was born – an online directory aiming to simplify access to public grants, incentives and schemes available to Maltese citizens.

Cutting through the noise

According to Mr Cachia, the biggest challenge is not the lack of opportunities, but the difficulty in finding them. “The main challenges revolve around the fact there are so many grants available provided by so many different entities and Government institutions,” he tells WhosWho.mt.

“It’s fantastic that we are provided so many opportunities and schemes, however becoming aware of these opportunities is very challenging. Searching on Google ends up returning a lot of outdated information, and most websites are not optimised for SEO making them hard to discover.”

By gathering them into one place, Grants.mt now lists over 250 schemes ranging from property incentives and business support to cultural, sports, and family-related grants.

Although the website is still in its early stages – with zero marketing spend so far – it has already reached more than 1,200 unique visitors and even landed on Google’s first page. He notes that user interest is clear.

“Our analytics show that people are by far most interested in the housing and business support categories. However, others such as sports and arts and culture do also receive quite a bit of interest.”

Building a collaborative platform

Looking ahead, Mr Cachia sees great potential for collaboration. “So far I’ve spoken to a number of these public entities who offer these grants, and they were all very receptive and willing to collaborate. After all, this platform will also make their lives easier by helping promote the grants they offer, providing information directly to consumers and thus avoiding a lot of calls and querying on their end.”

He adds that regular updates from the entities themselves would be a major step towards keeping the site accurate and useful. “Them sending us regular updates whenever grants are updated would be very helpful to ensure the site is always up to date.”

Beyond collaboration, Mr Cachia envisions new features to make the platform even more practical. One of these will be a personalised subscription system. “We also plan to add a number of features in due course – such as allowing people to subscribe to specific categories they are interested in to receive direct email notifications whenever updates do occur.”

From losing out on a grant to creating a resource that already benefits hundreds, his initiative highlights the real need for clarity in navigating Malta’s often complex network of public schemes.

What started as a personal frustration has the potential to evolve into a community-driven hub – making it easier for others to seize the opportunities that might otherwise slip through the cracks.