By Alix Peterson Zwane.
The emphasis on “fightback” implies a proactive and determined approach to counter obstacles, indicating that the application of scalable innovations is key to advancing development goals.
Innovation is central to the modern development agenda. The Covid pandemic in 2020–2021 wiped out 25 years of progress in lifting people out of poverty leaving, tragically, more people in poverty than there have been in recent memory.
We cannot take 25 years to regain this ground. We must find ways to move faster, and do so at a time of scarce resources, in a world with very different aspirations around a range of topics, from gender equality to carbon neutrality.
However, a successful innovation agenda requires equal attention to scale. Identifying impactful innovations and generating evidence on them are not enough to meet recovery and rebuilding goals. Backed by these proof points, innovations must be scalable and scaled.
GIF can already point to scaling success stories across our portfolio. We calculate that the innovations that we have supported that have scaled significantly, and for which sufficient data are available, give a social rate of return of 1.4 to 7.5 per dollar invested. Conservative assumptions about the performance of these innovations over the next five years suggest the return on the GIF portfolio as a whole is also positive, at 1.28 per dollar invested.
