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. […]

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 […]

On Earth Day 2021, and as world leaders gather for the two-day virtual Leaders’ Summit on Climate, our CEO, Alix Peterson Zwane, writes about GIF’s commitment to net-zero emissions and the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Terra Carta, as well as the role that GIF can play as an investor in impact at the nexus of innovation […]

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 […]