Global Innovation Fund Grants

Overview

Evidence is essential to innovation and we are committed to promoting smart, evidence-led investing.

Research plays a central role: as a source of innovative ideas, and as a tool for assessing their impact, cost-effectiveness and scalability. We are very interested in supporting policy reforms that could improve the equity or efficiency of public sector performance. We support investments in public, private and non-profit activities, using all available financial instruments.

GIF construes “innovation” broadly, to include behavioural nudges and organisational innovations as well as hardware and software. Some examples include:

• The Behavioural Insight Team’s work on improving tax compliance
• A training system for skills and entrepreneurship developed by Educate!, an Ugandan organisation
• Segovia’s system for facilitating cash transfers to vulnerable populations
• Simprint’s rugged biometric identification system
• Sparkmeter’s technologies to promote access to electricity

Evidence is at the heart of GIF’s staged approach to investment. GIF takes well-informed risks in pursuit of high social benefits. To do so, we embed learning into each investment. We want to know things like: does this innovation improve poor people’s well-being? How? Under what conditions? By how much? Does it promote gender equality? Is it cost-effective? How sensitive is demand to income and price? The answers will guide decisions by GIF and others on whether and how to scale up the innovations.

Criteria for funding

• Innovation: Research should promote real world implementation of an innovative approach to an important development challenge. Innovations are things that make it easier, faster, less costly, or otherwise more feasible to achieve a development result than current practice. This includes testing to see if a result demonstrated in one context applies in others.
• Potential impact: GIF is looking for innovations that make a big difference. These are innovations that, if scaled up or replicated, could make a substantial difference to millions of lives, or perhaps a transformative difference to hundreds of thousands. Target innovations have social benefits that far outweigh social costs.
• Poverty focus: Target innovations are those that can improve the lives of those living at $5/day, and especially those subsisting on less than $2/day. This criterion is applied at the level of the beneficiary. So while GIF works mostly in low-income countries or provinces, it could consider, for instance, innovations that help impoverished slum-dwellers in a middle-income country.

Potential for and pathway to scale: GIF wants to support ideas that scale up.

GIF encourages applications from women and from researchers and organisations based in developing countries.

No basic or laboratory research:  GIF doesn’t support theoretical research or laboratory based research.

If you have an innovative idea that you’d like to test for proof of concept, you can apply for a pilot grant (up to $230,000). If you’re past the pilot stage and ready to rigorously test impact and cost-effectiveness, you can apply for a test and transition grant (up to $2.3 million)

If you are interested in evaluating an innovation being implemented by a government, business, or NGO, team up with them and apply for funding. The application could come either from the implementer or the researcher. For innovations that already have good supporting evidence and want to generate further learning as they expand and evolve, total funding can go up to $15 million

If you’ve already evaluated an innovation and found it to be promising, let us know about it, and encourage the innovator to apply to GIF for scale-up.