Protecting and strengthening our impact

As throughout the pandemic, GIF’s focus in 2021 has been on protecting our current portfolio’s impact as we continue building a diverse set of investments to confront the challenges faced by the world’s poorest.  

We expect this impact from our evidence-based grants and risk capital investments to benefit 134 million people each year by 2031. Looking back on the year, I am pleased with the progress we made, which has been possible due to the support of our engaged donors to whom we are extremely grateful, including:

• Six investments including four new innovations addressing development challenges ranging from gender-based violence to COVID response to clean water access. 
• A major increase in transparency as working with the international NGO Publish What You Fund challenged us to be exemplar of their transparency initiatives.  We’ve increased the content on our website, including a full list of investments and targeted impacts, as well as completion reports assessing the achievements of, and lessons learned from, our past portfolio innovations. Additionally, we are now generating and publishing impact briefs analysing the impact that innovations currently funded by GIF have achieved to date.
• Two of GIF’s 2021 grants were part of our Innovating for Gender Equality Fund,  founded in partnership with Global Affairs Canada. The partnership has produced an excellent toolkit we use to make gender transformative investments and has been helpful in how we think about both generating evidence of impact and integrating gender equality outcomes into GIF’s Practical Impact methodology. More information about this is on the resources section of GIF’s website.
• At the COP26 conference in Glasgow, GIF launched our new Innovating for Climate Resilience Fund. This initiative will find and fund innovations focused on adaptation and resilience with the potential to improve the lives and livelihoods of the world’s poorest people, who we know are especially vulnerable to climate change. I am delighted that we could launch this new initiative with funding from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, in strategic partnership with the Global Resilience Partnership and the Adaptation Research Alliance. We will make our first set of new climate investments in Q1 2022, and will continue to share progress on this bold new initiative.
• We were proud to have played a catalytic role in the journey of one of our portfolio companies, Kamatan, as its growth – enabled by GIF’s investment capital – attracted the attention of an agriculture finance and value chain company in India which resulted in an acquisition. The combination of both companies is expected to exceed GIF’s original impact-at-scale ambition and we project Kamatan will be able to partner with a significantly higher number of smallholder farmers than our initial estimates.
• This year we launched a series of GIF learning events to share knowledge and ideas between innovators and entrepreneurs on the topics of asset and customer financing to grow business and impact, and scaling and commercialising agricultural technologies. 

As we continue to invest for impact and launch new strategic initiatives in 2022, please keep an eye on our website for more information and sign up for our newsletter.

My best wishes to you for a prosperous 2022.

Alix

?  Image courtesy of GIF partner No Means No Worldwide.