Development Innovation Ventures

Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) aims to find and support breakthrough solutions to development challenges.  Through this grant programme funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), DIV invests in these ideas, tests them using analytical methods, and scales solutions to prove they work.  

From the DIV website:
"We fund ideas that are in different phases of rollout, and depending on their current phase applicants can propose a project in any of the three stages below.  To move from one stage from the next, applicants must re-compete.

STAGE ONE is for projects in the proof of concept phase: DIV will grant these projects up to $100,000 dollars over one year so that grantees can refine prototypes and gather the evidence they need to pull in more investment and grow.

STAGE TWO is for larger projects, typically to expand across a country. DIV will grant Stage Two projects up to $1 million.  In exchange, Stage Two projects will build in rigorous testing to prove if the project is viable at its larger size.

STAGE THREE is for much larger projects.  For grants of up to $15 million over several years, solutions that have already proven to work at a large scale will be expanded much further, and often into multiple countries.

By the end of Stage Three, successful projects will have rigorous evidence of multinational impact.  At this point DIV will exit, and we expect that the projects will commercialize or be replicated by various developing country governments or donor institutions. And so, within ten years, the best solutions will be mainstreamed and reach tens of millions of beneficiaries around the globe."