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. […]

The Asia Philanthropy Congress, which took place last week in Tokyo, is a platform that will seek solutions to social problems through cross-sectoral collaboration. It also provides a venue for setting agendas to address Asia’s social issues as well as facilitating dialogue among philanthropists, foundations and other stakeholders throughout Asia. There were many interesting panels, […]

Five GIF investments have been selected to receive funds from American philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in her latest $12 billion giveaway. Scott’s announcement praised the use of funds as a means to get money to “a diverse group of smaller organisations”. “Of special note is that many of the organizations are funds. For anyone similarly interested in […]

Traditional aid agencies and DFIs cannot always take risks on early stage, innovative ventures, which creates what is often referred to as the “pioneer gap”.  Early seed funding, where available, may help the innovators to understand the market need, develop a value proposition and demonstrate early proof of concept, but the funding required to validate […]

The MTV Staying Alive Foundation’s mission is to drive social change among youth. Fusing data-driven insights with pop culture is their modus operandi. The MTV Staying Alive Foundation is scaling up their work in Africa and India with three new campaigns which take the company’s reach beyond HIV and reproductive health to reach beyond HIV […]

According to the World Bank, “climate change will push up to 130 million people into poverty over the next 10 years, unravelling hard-won development gains, and could cause over 200 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050”. Many developing countries near the equator have experienced almost eight times as many natural disasters […]

The world’s largest diplomatic convention is taking place in New York this week, with the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) taking place in-person for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The agenda includes the ongoing impact of COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, threats to the global economy, and the worsening climate […]