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 Global Innovation Fund was established as an impact-focused, venture-style investment vehicle, designed to be able to support the rigorous testing and scaling up of innovative solutions to problems faced by the world’s poorest people. As such, innovation and experimentation – exploring and learning about what works and what doesn’t – have been at the […]

This year’s Kenya Innovation Week (KIW), held 6 to 8 December in Nairobi, focussed on innovation’s potential to develop the economies and improve individual livelihoods. Through panel discussions and start-up exhibitions, anchored around the theme ‘Connecting Innovations GLocally”, the event highlighted Kenya’s successes and failures and charted a way forward for embracing innovation. The phrase […]

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 […]