News and blogs

With the world entering an economic downturn of unprecedented magnitude, high on our agenda is protecting our partner organisations and the social value they have created. The organisations and innovators in the GIF portfolio were on track to positively impact the lives of 89 million people by 2030 before this crisis. We must work to […]

GIF is providing a $1.46 million grant to SmartStart, a non-profit company creating social franchises aimed at scaling up quality Early Childhood Education (ECE) across South Africa. SmartStart currently reaches roughly 35,000 children a year through 3,500 practitioners in all nine of South Africa’s provinces, and is targeting 10,000 practitioners with the aim of reaching […]

GIF has awarded a $2.7 million grant to current partner Lively Minds to support the Government of Ghana’s efforts to embed the Lively Minds programme in 1,600 kindergartens in four of the poorest regions of Ghana over the next three years. The Lively Minds programme incorporates community-run educational games in government kindergarten schools. These games […]

With a renewed emphasis on investing for gender equality, GIF is pleased to announce the appointment of Kippy Joseph as Senior Advisor, Gender. At this moment in time, as development actors increasingly recognize that COVID-19 exacerbates existing inequalities, including gender inequality, the work Kippy will lead has become even more critical. Kippy joins GIF with […]

I am pleased to welcome Hashim Wasswa Mulangwa to GIF as our first Chief Development Strategy Officer, which will see him working across all GIF investments – including grants and risk capital investments – to ensure they are firmly grounded in evidence and development economics. I know that GIF will benefit from Hashim’s background in […]

Learning is at the heart of everything we do at GIF which makes us very excited to kickstart the process of documenting our investments and grants as they close or move to a different phase. This critical work will allow us to understand in greater detail how and where we are adding value as investors, […]

GIF’s flexible model is designed to support innovation for both immediate development challenges and longer term social change, and this flexibility has allowed us to pivot to address the realities of the pandemic. Another important part of the model is accountability and learning, and now that we are five years into our journey to support […]