Alix Peterson Zwane.

Alix Peterson Zwane served as GIF’s CEO for eight years, shaping our organisation from its inception as a flagship UK-US project mobilising aid funding into high impact innovations and guiding its growth as a leading multilateral investment vehicle with a portfolio of 68 innovations with a footprint across 36 countries. Now, as a senior adviser to GIF, she gives the executive and board the benefit of her counsel as we transition to new leadership.

Alix has 20 years of experience advancing the agenda of evidence-based aid and international development as an investor, a social entrepreneur, and an innovator. She was the first employee and Executive Director at Evidence Action, a non-profit that develops service delivery models to scale evidence-based programmes. She also advocated for evidence-based philanthropy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google.org, where she set strategy, made investments to support new public service models that work for the poor, and developed models for outcome-based grant-making.

Alix was a member of the faculty of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently serves as Executive-in-Residence at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability at Duke University, and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University.