News and blogs

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. […]

GIF is excited to announce a $1.5 million investment in Viamo, a social enterprise that improves access to information, education and vital services by making it accessible for governments, multilateral agencies, and civil society organisations to communicate with disconnected stakeholders through innovative mobile technology in local languages. With more than three billion people without internet […]

Over the last year, we’ve spent time thinking and consulting with our government partners, climate experts, and other key stakeholders, about the role investors should play at the nexus of innovation and climate change. Despite the increasing amounts of funding directed towards climate action from governments and other investors, a lack of quality data and […]

Last September, the international NGO Publish What You Fund – which works “to ensure that all aid and development data is transparent and available, usable and used” –  asked GIF CEO Alix Peterson Zwane to consult on possible transparency standards for Development Finance Institutions as part of their initiative to increase DFI transparency.  Our Deputy […]

GIF seeks to achieve impact by finding and funding evidence-backed innovations with the potential to transform the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people. We invest, therefore, in a wide range of innovations from bringing financial services to the poor, contributing to domestic resource mobilisation, improving livelihoods and education, and increasing access to water […]

Last year, GIF kick-started a new workstream of retrospective mini-evaluations for closed and exited investments and we are now publishing the summaries from these assessments as we complete them. Grounded in best-practice, these completions assessments are based largely on desk reviews and interviews with investees and other stakeholders, and reflect the diversity of our portfolio […]

Kamatan, a company GIF initially invested in just last year, has now been acquired by Samunnati. Based in India, Kamatan is an agricultural technology startup that works with cooperatives called Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) to source produce for direct supply to agricultural enterprises, processors, and retailers. Kamatan helps these FPOs in procuring, storing, quality control […]