Development Innovation Ventures Newsletter

November 2022

A Swoop Aero drone delivers medical supplies to a nurse in Malawi. ©Madison Jefferey for Swoop Aero

DIV Announces 12 New Awards

As the year draws to a close, Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) is pleased to announce the final 12 awards added to our portfolio for 2022. This brings DIV’s new award total this year to 25!

These awardees are addressing the world’s toughest challenges through creative approaches, from piloting an app that will improve financial inclusion in Colombia, to testing a new way to manage fecal sludge in India, to expanding access to cleaner and more fuel-efficient cookstoves in Ghana and Nigeria.

These new awardees are working across nine countries—including Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Peru, and Sierra Leone—to advance evidence-based innovations in agriculture, economic growth, education, energy, environment, and health sectors. Two awardees are new partners to USAID, and seven will rigorously test the impact of their innovations using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We’re also excited to announce that BURN Manufacturing, a company based in the state of Washington and Kenya, became the second grantee to win awards at all three of DIV’s funding stages.  

BURN Manufacturing
Scaling Clean Cooking—BURN Manufacturing West Africa Expansion
Stage 3 | $2.1 million | Kenya

BURN Manufacturing is one of the most successful manufacturers of high efficiency cookstoves, having already manufactured and sold over one million stoves in East Africa. BURN will accelerate their impact by expanding production and sales to Ghana and Nigeria, where they expect to reach six million people, generating substantial household savings on fuel while reducing pollution and pressure on deforestation. Read about BURN’s Stage 1 and Stage 2 work. 

Fundación Capital
Banking Agents as Financial Inclusion Promoters in Underserved Areas
Stage 1 | $200,000 | Colombia

Fundación Capital will enhance an app that advances financial inclusion in rural communities by extending banking services to underserved populations. The app trains banking agents, such as employees of retail stores and post offices, to serve as intermediaries contracted by financial institutions to process clients’ transactions.

Harvard University
Building Local State Capacity: Evidence from Technology Investments
Stage 2 | $870,000 | Ghana

Harvard University will work with the Ghanaian government to test the impact of an app that provides maps of all property and tax valuations, tax payment histories and receipts, and geolocation data to tax collectors. Harvard will conduct three RCTs to determine the effects of adopting tax collection technology on local revenue generation and citizen morale, and to unpack the barriers to technology adoption at scale.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) 
Scaling Agricultural Input Markets
Stage 2 | $840,000 | Mali

IPA will incentivize local enterprises to organize agricultural input fairs, which bring together farmers and companies selling agricultural products. IPA will then evaluate the impact of these fairs on farmers’ fertilizer use, crop choices, crop yields, and livelihoods, including potential income gains, food security, and poverty reduction. This award builds off a successful Evidence Generation award (2019–2022). 

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)
Scaling a Technology-Based Early Childhood Care Intervention
Stage 2 | $1.3 million | Peru

IPA will conduct an RCT on a smartphone app that shows parents easy, evidence-based ways to engage and stimulate the minds of their young children. The research is designed to inform public policies on how to bring early childhood care and stimulation programs to scale, in order to set children up for success when they start school.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)
Social Incentives for Childhood Immunization
Stage 2 | $1.5 million | Sierra Leone

Colorful bracelets that indicate a child’s immunization status have been shown to incentivize parents to fully vaccinate their children. IPA will work with the Government of Sierra Leone to adapt an immunization bracelet program for nationwide scale. IPA will evaluate the effectiveness of the bracelets and compare them with other behavioral nudges, such as mobile messaging.

Swoop Aero
Using Drones to Strengthen Medical Supply Chains
Stage 2 | $870,000 | Malawi

Swoop operates a drone network that delivers medicines over long distances and across difficult terrain. It will expand drone operations to 100 additional medical facilities across hard-to-reach districts in southern Malawi and northern islands where drones will provide real-time medical supplies and services. This award will also support data analytics organization IDinsight to conduct the first rigorous trials on the efficacy of drones on health outcomes. 

THINKMD
Evaluating a Digital Health Tool to Improve the Clinical Capacity of Frontline Health Workers
Stage 2 | $1.5 million | Nigeria

U.S. company THINKMD developed and tested an app-based digital diagnostic tool that helps frontline health workers evaluate and treat patients according to World Health Organization guidelines and standard medical procedures. THINKMD will conduct an RCT to determine the tool’s effectiveness in enabling community health workers and nurses to provide a similar quality of care to that offered by medical doctors.

WASH Institute
Scaling Up Fecal Sludge Management Through Mobile Treatment Units
Stage 2 | $500,000 | India

The WASH Institute has developed Mobile Treatment Units that empty and treat fecal sludge from septic tanks on site, collecting the solids and discharging treated water that can be used for general irrigation. It will test a range of public and private sector partnership approaches and business models to position Mobile Treatment Units for significant scale.

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)
Piloting a Business Model for Sensor-Controlled Riverbank Filtration
Stage 1 | $200,000 | India

TERI will test the effectiveness of a riverbank water filtration system to improve clean water access and promote the more efficient use of irrigation. The filtration system includes a new combination of field sensors and irrigation pumps to better target water needs to improve crop yields and increase livelihood earnings. TERI will also pilot a business model that allows farmers to pool their resources and collectively purchase the filtration and sensor system. 

Yale University
A Tough Call: Impact of Mobile Technology on Work, Gender Gaps, and Norms
Evidence Generation | $600,000 | India

Yale will generate evidence on the efficacy of an at-scale approach designed to help close the gender digital divide. The study will evaluate the impact of an Indian Government program that distributed free mobile phones and data plans to women who are the heads of households in Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest states. The wide-ranging study will examine how the phones affected economic outcomes, access to information, and social norms around the acceptability of women using the mobile technology.

DIV Releases New Annual Program Statement (APS)

On November 1, 2022, USAID released a new Annual Program Statement (APS) for DIV. The APS provides prospective applicants with the essential information they need to apply to DIV for grant funding. Learn more.

DIV Innovator Spotlight

Raising Demand for High Quality Health Care: How Short Message Service (SMS)-Based Digital Health Platform PROMPTS Gives Mothers Across Kenya Greater Agency to Improve Care Quality DIV grantee Jacaranda Health’s PROMPTS enables Kenyan women to anonymously report on the standard of care in health facilities, including how they were treated. This blog from the Global Digital Health Network features PROMPTS as a powerful accountability tool toward better quality care. Read now.

MacKenzie Scott Gives $15 Million to VisionSpring Congratulations to DIV grantee VisionSpring for its exceptional work that attracted a $15 million donation from MacKenzie Scott. This donation is believed to be the largest single donation towards helping solve the problem of uncorrected vision and kickstarts an initiative to provide glasses to hundreds of thousands of low-income tea, coffee, cocoa, and artisan workers in India, Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. Read more.

Shamba ShapeUp Farm Makeover Show Shares Latest Uganda Episodes DIV Stage 2 grantee Mediae Group Ltd’s popular edutainment show, which helps farmers improve food production, has shared a new batch of entertaining and informative episodes on YouTube in Luganda and English. The episodes will air in both languages on three channels in Uganda. Watch now.

Muso Wins the 2022 Future United Multiplier Award Congratulations to Muso Health! In September, during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Muso—a two-time DIV grantee—was awarded the 2022 Future United Multiplier Award by GBCHealth. This prize recognizes the Muso team for partnering with patients to create impact that continues to amplify and multiply in the world. Watch here.

DIV in the Media

Failure is Not Free: Maximizing Learning Velocity With Funding From Development Innovation Ventures In this podcast from Dimagi, host Jonathan Jackson reflects on the company’s two rounds of funding awarded by USAID DIV. The grants allowed Dimagi to test CommCare, an open source mobile data platform now used by more than 600,000 frontline health workers, worldwide. Listen now.

Stanford Impact Labs: New Frontiers in Science Research and Development (R&D) Are Shaping Our Next $10 Million in Investments

In this post from Stanford Impact Labs, Pallavi Trikutam and Michael Eddy share their new investment strategy, which reflects what they’ve learned from funders like DIV! Read more.

Funding Opportunities

Apply for Food Loss and Waste Partnerships Facility The Feed the Future Market Systems and Partnerships Activity invites for-profit businesses in Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, and Tanzania to apply for co-investment through its Food Loss and Waste Partnerships Facility. Applications are due by December 9. Learn more.

The Agency Fund The Agency Fund is a multi-donor partnership focused on innovations and organizations that support people to navigate difficult lives. The Fund currently has an open window for research and innovation concepts within this general scope, and a targeted window for projects that discover and nurture math talent in low- and middle-income countries. The next deadline is January 2023. Read about the Agency Fund’s calls.

Browse DIV’s Portfolio

To learn more about DIV’s portfolio and get the latest news from DIV and its grantees, visit divportal.usaid.gov. 

DIV is accepting applications! Please visit www.usaid.gov/div to learn more and apply.