When USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures shut down a year ago, it didn’t just put more than 100 active awards at risk. It raised a broader question about how to carry forward the unique initiative’s social impact mission — which uses a venture-style approach to find new innovations, pressure-test them, and help them grow.
Specifically, that approach uses open calls to surface new ideas, evaluating proposals based on evidence, cost-effectiveness, and pathways to scale. It also uses a tiered funding model — with smaller pilot grants, funding for rigorous testing, and larger investments tied to stronger evidence of impact. Since it first launched in 2010, DIV supported more than 300 innovations across 54 countries, while also influencing how other donors adopt new evidence-driven approaches to scaling what works.
Now, that approach is reemerging in a new form. The DIV Fund, an independent nonprofit formally launching today, is picking up where USAID’s DIV left off after the agency’s innovation unit closed in early 2025 following the Trump administration’s stop-work order.