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. […]

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 […]

As part of GIF’s effort to respond to the global COVID-19 pandemic, GIF is providing BRAC, a leading international NGO with expertise in large scale programming in health, with $1.05 million in grant funding to focus on Sierra Leone’s and Uganda’s efforts to fight the virus. Leveraging the experience earned during the 2014-2016 Ebola Crisis, […]

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. […]