Find Nonprofit and Small Business Grants

Grants to USA, Canada, and International nonprofit and for-profit organizations, IHEs, governmental organizations, and international and multilateral organizations to pilot and test creative international development strategies. Funding is intended to support ideas that can dramatically improve or save the lives of impoverished populations in developing countries.

Through a year-round grant competition, Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) sources innovative ideas, pilots and rigorously tests them, and supports the scale-up of solutions that demonstrate proven impact and cost-effectiveness. DIV’s tiered funding model; inspired by venture capital funds, invests comparatively small amounts of funding in a variety of unproven ideas, and provides more substantial support only to those that demonstrate rigorous evidence of impact, cost-effectiveness, and potential to scale. Taking a portfolio approach to its impact enables DIV to embrace risk - and occasional failure - as it generates an evidence base for open innovation. DIV’s aim is to create a portfolio of innovations across all sectors and geographies in which USAID works, to improve the lives of millions around the world.

DIV funds development innovations, which can include:

- New technologies.
- New ways of delivering or financing goods and services.
- More cost-effective adaptations to existing solutions.
- New ways of increasing uptake of existing proven solutions,
- Policy changes, shifts, or nudges based on insights from behavioral economics.
- Social or behavioral innovations.

Innovations are not required to be technology-based, but should be evidence-informed. DIV supports applications on all development topics and sectors.

There are three fundamental objectives that drive DIV’s search for innovative and impactful development solutions:

- Evidence—DIV is designed to find, test, and scale-up the most effective innovations, and encourage rigorous testing methods (e.g., market tests, randomized controlled trials) as appropriate, given a proposal’s stage and scale path. Evidence can encompass ultimate impacts (e.g., infant mortality), or improvements in implementation outcomes (e.g., adoption) for solutions that have been causally linked to ultimate impacts in the past. Measurement of impact should focus either on outcome variables that can be taken as objectives in themselves (e.g., lives saved or additional income), or on intermediate outcomes for which strong evidence already exists of impact on ultimate outcomes (e.g., vaccination rates).

- Cost-Effectiveness—DIV seeks innovations that deliver more development impacts per dollar than other ways of achieving the same development goals, such as increased literacy per dollar in comparison to existing practices to improve literacy. Cost-effectiveness does not necessarily mean an innovation must be the lowest-cost innovation. Rather, cost-effectiveness is a function of both impact and cost. An innovation can be highly cost-effective either by achieving a larger impact on specific outcomes at a cost comparable to alternatives, or by achieving comparable impact on specific outcomes at a significantly lower cost than alternatives.

- Pathways to Scale—DIV’s ultimate goal is to support development solutions to scale sustainably in order to reach millions of people. Solutions must have a potential pathway to scale, whether a) commercially; b) through incorporation into the practices of developing country governments, donors, or philanthropists; or c) through a combination of commercial and public or philanthropic support. DIV recognizes that innovations can take a variety of pathways to scale, but expects that they will ultimately grow without continued DIV support.

Stages of Financing:

- Stage 1 Proof-of-Concept/InitialTesting
- Stage 2 Testing and Positioning for Scale
- Stage 3 Scaling
- Evidence Generation

For details on each of these funding stages, see: https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/15396/DIV_APS_X_final.pdf#page=6