News and blogs

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 […]

The onset of COVID-19 in March of last year had a profound impact on the way we all live and work, but particularly in the case of the world’s poorest people, who were disproportionately affected by the devastating health and economic effects of a virus that has eradicated decades of development progress, leaving more people […]

Is it desirable – or even possible – to place a value on improving women’s and girls’ agency?  Yes to both, according to GIF.  We think that funders and policymakers implicitly place a value on women’s agency when they choose to implement programs that ignore gender equity – and that implicit value is often zero. […]

The scale and urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented demand for timely, accurate and accessible information. Governments are grappling with how to access and use up-to-date data on COVID-19 and how to effectively communicate with citizens in an environment proliferated by myths and misinformation. South Africa, which has been especially affected by […]

One of the core tenets of the Global Innovation Fund is a commitment to Open Innovation, the idea that innovation can come from anyone, anywhere. Since GIF was launched in 2014, we have maintained an ever-open window for applications and in that time have received thousands of applications from across the globe. The open application […]

In 2019, in partnership with Global Affairs Canada, GIF made a commitment to fund innovations that explicitly aim to transform unequal gender relations for women and girls. To do this effectively, GIF has sought to ensure gains in women’s and girls’ agency, and reductions in violence against women and girls, would be appropriately recognized and […]