Criteria: Stage | Amount Per Prize | |
---|---|---|
Stage 3 | £50,000 - £2,300,000 | |
Stage 4 | Up to £2,300,000 | |
Stage 5<span class="font-light"> and </span>6 | Up to £15,000,000 |
Stage | Stage 3: Proof of Concept, Stage 4: Transition to Scale, Stage 5: Scaling and Stage 6: Sustained Scale | |
Implemented in: | ||
Region | Low and Middle Income Countries | |
Country | N/A | |
Focus Areas | All Sectors |
Target Beneficiaries | We are open to funding innovations inany sectoras long as you can show that your innovation improves the lives of those living on less than $5 PPP per day, especially less than $2 PPP per day Pilot: Small numbers (normally a few thousand) Test and transition: A large range (from thousands to hundreds of thousands) Scale: Transformative (e.g. reaches millions of people) | REQUIRED | |
Planned Usage of Funds | If you are a for-profit company, or have a market route to scale, it is likely more appropriate for you to apply for equity or debt. The fund may give grants to for-profit companies in the cases where there is a large social impact and there is a clear case that we are not crowding-out private capital. Additionally, we are open to providing grants to for-profit companies to fund rigorous evidence generation around the impact of your model on people living on less than $5 PPP per day. If you are a non-profit, and have a public-sector or hybrid path to scale, a grant is likely to be most appropriate. To secure a grant, however, you need to demonstrate that your innovation has the potential to be a cost-effective way to solve the given development challenge. | ||
Potential for Scale | The fund’s goal is to scale innovative solutions to development challenges that are backed by rigorous evidence. We only fund innovations with the potential to scale to reach millions of people living on less than $5 PPP a day. Our staged funding approach allows us to support innovations at different stages on their path to scale, from small scale field pilots to scaling a proven intervention to a whole new country. If you are applying at the pilot stage, please make sure to explain how the innovation you are working on could scale and grow. We are interested in funding pilot projects that reach 1,000 people in the next 12 months, so long as the model has the potential to scale to reach millions of people in the long run. If your innovation is only ever designed to reach a few thousand people in a specific context, you are a not a good fit for GIF even at the pilot stage. Your organisation does not have to scale the innovation directly.While in some cases, your organisation may be able to scale an innovation directly to reach millions of people, we also expect many innovations to scale through partnerships (such as with government or philanthropic organisations or other firms). In assessing the potential of an applicant’s intervention to scale, we evaluate its operational, financial and social viability at scale. Even applicants not currently at scale should be ready to explore who would likely implement and pay for the innovation at scale. | ||
Evidence/Proof of Concept | The fund is committed to supporting the acceleration and transition to scale of innovations that are backed by rigorous evidence. To that end, we will ask to see quantitative evidence that your innovation improves on business as usual. Often, but not always, this evidence may be generated via a rigorous randomized controlled trial or quantitative assessments that use other strategies to identify the causal impact of your approach relative to a comparable control group. Our expectations of the level of evidence you have to support your innovation increase with organisational stage. Later stage organisations, at larger scale, requesting larger amounts of funding are required to have more robust evidence of impact.
| ||
Other | The fund also employs a different level of due diligence at each stage – we have a streamlined process for pilots, whereas we conduct in-depth due diligence over an extended period of time for scale-stage support. |
We have tried to create a process that is light-touch at the early stages, so as not to burden innovators. If you are successful in stages 1 and 2, we will require more information and time involvement with you in later stages.
We are also always refining our processes, so our approach as outlined here may change in the future.