News and blogs

The U.S. House of Representative’s new subcommittee focusing on International Development, International Organisations and Global Corporate Social Impact held a hearing today and invited me, along with Ann Mei Chang and Ben Leo to offer testimony on the benefits of innovation in development policy and provide recommendations on how to advance the use of it […]

Previous blogs throughout March have illustrated how GIF looks at the issues around gender equality in international development and the tools we use to support our decision-making, drawing on examples of gender transformative investments in our portfolio. In the latest blog in our series, we want to showcase some of GIF’s venture support to enhance […]

Despite the potential high social returns of investing in innovations to benefit the poor, spending on innovation for international development is low, particularly for bilateral development assistance. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for instance, estimated concessional finance to science, technology, and innovation represents only about six percent of […]

As part of GIF’s effort to respond to the global COVID-19 pandemic, GIF is providing BRAC, a leading international NGO with expertise in large scale programming in health, with $1.05 million in grant funding to focus on Sierra Leone’s and Uganda’s efforts to fight the virus. Leveraging the experience earned during the 2014-2016 Ebola Crisis, […]

GIF’s investment mandate is focused on finding and funding innovative ventures and solutions that have high potential to be impactful on the lives of the poor, scalable to reach millions and cost effective. Applying these criteria has meant that GIF’s portfolio has been largely comprised of investments amenable to quantifying impacts generated by innovations (e.g. […]

Since its onset 12 months ago, COVID-19 has had a profound impact on decades of progress to improve the lives of people living in poverty throughout the developing world. In this blog post our CEO, Alix Peterson Zwane, reflects on how GIF has responded since the outbreak of the pandemic by protecting the social value […]