GDI WAS BORN TO BUILD

Anyone can create an impact on their own, but those who want to drive system-level change work with a team.

We match ambitious leaders, strong concepts, and capital with the executional power required to launch and scale transformational development ventures.

More than ever before, the world needs meaningful and transformational action.

Our Unconventional Approach

GDI is an incubator for transformational development ventures, working to build and scale the next generation of social impact solutions.

Whether these concepts originate from sector experts, or are developed and tested ourselves, we create new approaches to address persistent global issues.

Break Silos

We listen closely, interrogate the process, and bridge sectors to arrive at the best solutions to specific problems.

Hold Ourselves Accountable

We work closely with our partners every step of the way and measure our success by the real-world impact we create, not simply the advice we deliver.

Make the Connections

We catalyze potential partnerships and connect opportunities for funders, individuals, and organizations to work together towards common goals.

Think Long Term

We engage and empower organizations and initiatives to stand on their own as influencers in their fields.

We provide our partners intensive and comprehensive collaboration throughout the life-cycle of a new venture.

Our Growth Engineering Process

Over 12-36 months, we deploy our functional teams to help early-stage initiatives design their business strategy and model, develop their brand identity, hire and retain talent, and construct their financial and operational infrastructure.

Discover

Design

Build

Exit

Conduct a thorough and thoughtful review to understand the root problems and a hypothesized solution. Develop key business plan questions and refine an early concept note.

Collaborate with partners and funders to align on theory of change, validate the approach, build a governance system, and shape a powerful brand.

Develop leadership teams, pilot interventions with emerging results, build core operating infrastructure, and establish a strategic plan.

Launch entrepreneurs and incubated initiatives into the next phase of growth. Set future milestones and transfer knowledge to ensure the initiative’s long-term success.

For social impact pioneers, GDI serves as both a guide and implementer, looking to elevate our ventures and the broader causes they represent.

Our Work and Featured Initiatives

From a venture’s discovery to its operational building blocks, we leverage our outsider experience and insider commitment to turn big ideas into action. We are committed to working with our partners for the long-haul, crossing sector boundaries to forge critical relationships between traditional and non-traditional development actors.

Browse our incubated initiatives to see how we design and build transformational development ventures, and read our thought leadership to learn more about the ideas that power our work.

GDI is your trusted advisor when you need guidance, your “start-up team” when you need to get stuff done, and a mentor when you need a push in the right direction.

GDI's Leadership Team

The GDI team comes from a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences, but we’re united by a proven track record of entrepreneurship, deep social sector expertise, and a culture of doing whatever it takes to get things done. Below is a snapshot of GDI’s leadership team.

  • Andrew Stern
    Andrew Stern
  • Warren Ang
    Warren Ang
  • Alice Gugelev
    Alice Gugelev
  • Chintan Maru
    Chintan Maru
  • Steve Bergen
    Steve Bergen
  • Thomas Carroll
    Thomas Carroll
  • Jessica Harrison Fullerton
    Jessica Harrison Fullerton
  • Andrew Gathecha
    Andrew Gathecha
  • Darin Kingston
    Darin Kingston
  • Suvranil Majumdar
    Suvranil Majumdar
  • Kim Matu
    Kim Matu
  • Danielle Maxwell
    Danielle Maxwell
  • Ann Murage
    Ann Murage
  • George N’dungu
    George N’dungu
  • Stuart Symington
    Stuart Symington
  • Jon Shepard
    Jon Shepard
  • Elizabeth VanDerWoude
    Elizabeth VanDerWoude
  • Jason Wendle
    Jason Wendle
Andrew Stern

Andrew is the Founder and CEO of GDI, and also serves as an ex-officio member of GDI’s US Board, a member and the Chair of GDI’s Hong Kong Board, and a member and the Chair of the GDI Solutions fiscal sponsor entity Board. He shapes new opportunities for GDI to drive the global development sector forward and provides strategic guidance to select incubated initiatives. Andrew has played many roles within GDI initiatives, including Interim CEO of Convergence and of Emerging Public Leaders. He currently serves on the Boards of Aceli Africa, citiesRISE, and the Refugee Investment Network, as well as the Advisory Board of Upstart Co-Lab.

Prior to founding GDI, Andrew was the Global Operating Partner at Dalberg Global Advisors. During that time, he helped design and launch ANDE and served as the founding co-chairperson of mothers2mothers. Andrew holds a joint MBA/MPP from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School and a BA in Economics from Princeton University. When he isn’t urging nonprofits toward their ‘endgames,’ Andrew can be found gardening, kayaking and chasing his young daughter around.

Warren Ang

Warren is the CEO of GDI East Asia, where he spearheads GDI’s work in East Asia from Hong Kong. He works alongside the leadership of mission-driven businesses, non-profits and initiatives, as a long-term partner to design, incubate and implement strategies that achieve large-scale social impact. Warren brings strategic consulting and nonprofit management experience to GDI. He has worked at Dalberg Global Development Advisors (Asia), PwC Strategy (Australia), and was the Executive Director of a 170+ employee NGO in Yunnan, China. Warren holds an MBA with distinction from INSEAD. He has also developed a comprehensive personality assessment that he can occasionally be persuaded to administer to his colleagues.

Alice Gugelev

Alice is a Managing Director of GDI US and the CEO of GDI Africa, where she works with large corporations, commercial investors and INGOs to integrate social impact, innovation and social entrepreneurship efforts into their portfolios, and helps philanthropists and social enterprises more effectively create systems-level change. Prior to joining GDI, Alice worked at Bridgespan, Bain & Co, the World Bank and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. She is the co-founder and executive director of The Muskoka Foundation, as well as the co-founder and chief strategy officer of AppMkr. Alice earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and has a double major BA in International Economics and East Asian Studies from Columbia University and Stanford Japan Center. Alice enjoys spending time at her cabin in Canada with her family – and lots of uninvited black flies.

Chintan Maru

Chintan is Managing Director at GDI, where he leads a portfolio of initiatives focused on human-centered health systems. He is Founder and CEO of Leapfrog to Value which is advancing the field of value-based care in low- and middle-income countries. He was on the founding team of Oxygen Hub; supported the growth phase of iDSI, and serves on the boards of GDI – India, Alignd and the Detroit Institute for Law and Organizing.

Chintan is a medical doctor and public health advocate. Prior to GDI, he was a leader in McKinsey & Co’s public and social sector practice. He started his career at Tower Street Prison in Jamaica, conducting ethnographic research on HIV.

Chintan is a graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and majored in political science at Duke University. He was a Public Policy and International Affairs Fellow at Princeton University and a Fulbright Scholar to Jamaica. Chintan plays capoeira and dances.

Steve Bergen

Steve is the Associate Director for Operations and Special Projects at GDI. He has over 13 years of experience in program and project management, international compliance, managing donor funding, and nonprofit leadership. He has supported international activities on behalf of the National Science Foundation, Department of State, National Institutes of Health, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Steve was previously at CRDF Global where he served as a Technical Advisor for the organization’s cybersecurity portfolio and the Acting Director for the Research and Innovation Practice Area. He has worked extensively in the Eurasia and MENA regions in basic research, higher education, professional exchange, agriculture, global health, and information and communications technology (ICT). Steve received his M.A. in International Affairs and a B.A. in International Studies from American University. In his free time he enjoys tennis, traveling, baking, and running (3 marathons and counting).

Thomas Carroll

Tom is a Senior Advisor at GDI, where he works directly with rural enterprise development efforts. Tom focuses on GDI’s incubated initiatives in this space: ISF Advisors, Aceli Africa, the Rural & Agricultural Finance Learning Lab, and the Council on Smallholder Finance (CSAF). This includes the development and application of products and services for small agricultural enterprises, including finance, digital technology, and education. His efforts aim to make the economics of environmentally sound, community-led rural enterprise development sustainable.

Previously, Tom was a Partner at Dalberg Global Development Advisors where he led a strategy consulting portfolio that included efforts such as comprehensive investment/market entry analyses of global and regional commodity markets; the development of public-private partnerships across a host of those markets; the commercialization of agriculture technologies; and the design of innovative financing mechanisms in frontier markets. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for Aceli Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya, and EarthEnable, based in Kigali, Rwanda. Tom holds an MBA from Yale School of Management and a BA in government from the University of Notre Dame.

Jessica Harrison Fullerton

Jessica Harrison Fullerton is a Director within GDI’s Strategy and Build team, where she supports start-ups that include but are not limited to the global migration space. Jess has over 15 years of experience working with public, private and nonprofit organizations to increase their impact and scale. Jess has a background in strategy consulting from Dalberg Global Development Advisors and Bridgespan. Subsequently, at Evidence Action, she led an initiative to combat intestinal parasites in children using the supply chain of school systems and launched a five-year $35M program with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health and SCI to treat 100M children. Jess spent seven years in leadership roles in strategic planning and operations within the Program Quality, President’s Office, Emergency Unit and External Relations departments at the International Rescue Committee, a $1B organization delivering programs to conflict and crisis-affected populations globally.

Jess has a BA from Middlebury College, an MBA from Columbia Business School and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School. She is a former Term Member on the Council of Foreign Relations and authored the Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “School for Scaling.” In her spare time, she can be found hiking in the Boulder CO mountains where she lives with her husband, two young sons and dog, Tabasco.

Andrew Gathecha

Andrew serves as Chief Finance Officer (CFO) on the GDI Africa team. He is a finance and project management professional with several years of experience managing large, complex, multi-stakeholder grant programs, combined value of over $200 million, ensuring prudent investments in agriculture, health, and education; Worked cross-culturally – Kenya, Mozambique, Jordan, Liberia; Recent roles include: at Tanager, worked as global director for compliance and operations, and as team leader for AgResults, a private sector-driven pay-for-results project which helped improve grain storage capacity for smallholder farmers in Kenya; Was the technical grants manager for a USAID Kenya Horticulture Competitiveness Project implemented by Fintrac; was grants management specialist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kenya. Previously managed country finance and operations with various international development organizations, in addition to stints in the private sector as chief accountant. Andrew holds MBA from Edinburgh Business School (Heriot-Watt Univ, UK), and is a certified public accountant & member of ICPAK. Andrew resides in Nairobi with his wife and their five year old boy. He loves farming, traveling and playing Scrabble.

Darin Kingston

Darin is a Director at GDI, supporting the Marginalized Populations portfolio of multi-stakeholder initiatives and funds. In her incubation work, she has served as start-up COO for LaMP, the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, and Convergence; an advisor to Unorthodox Philanthropy and Emerging Public Leaders; and co-author of “More than the Sum of Its Parts: Making Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives Work.” Darin was also Managing Director for GDI 2019-2021. Prior to GDI, Darin designed and launched new social impact approaches and capabilities at a range of mission-driven organizations working to expand opportunity and access, from large humanitarian organizations (International Rescue Committee) to an offgrid energy business (d.light). She is a B Lab Standards Advisory Council member and a Council on Foreign Relations Term Member. Darin earned a MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and a BA in International Relations from Brown University. Darin loves fireworks and is pretty good at Knock-out.

Suvranil Majumdar

Suvranil is the Director, Climate and Environment at GDI. Before joining GDI, Suvranil worked at the World Bank Group for 13+ years where he led several climate smart development projects across transport/water/agribusiness sectors in India, SE Asia, Africa and Latin America. During these engagements, he had worked with governments, corporations, investors, think tanks and academia on creating the enabling environment for sustainable development through public private partnerships. He was one of the founding members of 2030 Water Resources Group (2030 WRG) and had led the design, development and implementation of the Eco Cities Platform at IFC. Suvranil co-founded the Climate Circle incubator at Harvard Innovation Labs where he is supporting 40+ startups working on clean energy, mobility, circular economy, carbon offsets, ESG. Suvranil has also worked in the technology sector for 6 years managing clients in the banking and financial services space in US,Europe, Middle East and East Asia. Suvranil holds a Master’s in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School.

Kim Matu

Kim has over 17 years of experience in Business Operations with a biased focus on Growth & Strategy, Process Mapping, Improvement & Innovation, Customer service, Business Development, and Research Field Operations, across Sub – Sahara Africa. As Associate Director and Shared Services Lead, Kim will be working closely with the GDI team to incubate the Shared Services Platform, assist with the design & implementation of data and impact tools while playing a strategic role of improving business operations across the organization.

Before joining GDI, Kim was the Chief Operations Officer for Generation Kenya, where he provided overall operational direction and leadership, while closely collaborating with the local and global leadership teams, to ensure that the organization fulfilled its core mission of uplifting youth into meaningful work opportunities. Generation is one of the fastest scaling global youth employment programs, providing young adults with the opportunity to launch successful careers and change their life trajectories.

Kim has also gained a wealth of expertise while working in various roles for Kantar Operations, TNS RMS East Africa, Samasource, Horizon Contact Centers, among other organizations in different capacities.

Danielle Maxwell

Danielle is the Senior Manager of Human Resources at GDI. She has spent her professional career working at nonprofits in various roles, including human resources, administrative operations, event planning, fundraising, donor relations, and finance management. Before joining GDI, Danielle was Director of Talent and Administration at Independent Sector and Deputy Director of Human Resources and Operations at New America. Danielle has a BA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, an MPA with a concentration in Nonprofit Management from American University, and is a senior certified human resource professional (SHRM-SCP) through the Society of Human Resources Management. In her free time, Danielle is either playing tennis or watching Premier League football.

Ann Murage

Ann Murage is an Associate Director, Operations and Programmes for GDI in Africa and formally served as a Manager with the Mastercard Foundation Rural and Agricultural Finance (RAF) Learning Lab. Ann has a background in project management,  with a focus on international development. She was involved in setting up GDI in Africa where her current responsibilities involve the institutionalization of policies & procedures, development and operationalization of the talent strategy, financial management and stakeholder engagement.

Prior to joining GDI, Ann worked as a Project Manager at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. She was responsible for partner engagements, research implementation, and coordination of key projects in Sub-Sahara Africa. Earlier in her career, she was instrumental in supporting regional finance project teams in setting up systems including providing onsite support to project offices in DR Congo, Sudan and Southern Sudan.

Ann holds an MBA from the University of Liverpool, she is a Certified Public Account and has qualifications in Microfinance, SME Finance. She is passionate about the promotion of improved livelihoods and uplifting of the less advantaged in society.

George N’dungu

George serves as the National Technical Assistance (TA) Coordinator at the GDI Nairobi office. He is a renowned development and humanitarian practitioner with 16 years of experience working with various governments, inter-governmental organizations and charities working in the larger Eastern Africa region.

Prior to joining GDI, he served as a technical government advisor in cash transfer programming in Kenya, Nigeria as well as for the UK Government on Afghanistan. He has also consulted for UNICEF Kenya, UNDP Kenya, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Intergovernmental Agency for Development (IGAD), DANIDA-funded Micro Enterprise Support Programme Trust (MESPT-Kenya), BOMA PROJECT, Wasafiri Consulting and East Africa Grain Council on various development programmes. His work has been presented and published in reputable international conferences, including in Kenya, South Africa, Germany and the UK. He is a beneficiary of the Firoz & Lalji Foundation’s Africa Leadership Programme and graduated from The London School of Economics (LSE) and Harvard University.

Stuart Symington

Stuart is the Associate Director of Brand, Marketing, and Communications at GDI. His passion for social impact was ignited by experience across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and East Asia. Stuart launched his career in East Africa by leading social impact projects in Djibouti, working with the Rwanda Development Board (RDB), and researching the post-genocide legal system in Rwanda.

After a successful career in tech startups, he joined National Public Radio (NPR) to lead marketing, brand and digital strategy. Stuart partnered with the Programming, Digital, and Partnership divisions, among others, to serve 165 million monthly listeners. Highlights included launching new podcasts (Life Kit, Throughline, White Lies, and Peabody-winning Believed), along with key projects for the NPR newsroom and NPR Music’s Tiny Desk. In recognition of his work, Adweek selected Stuart for their inaugural Executive Mentor Program cohort.

Stuart is a passionate advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, leading digital initiatives for D.C.’s official Capital Pride which has over 400,000 people attend annually. He grew the community online by partnering with platforms like Instagram, Giphy, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Stuart volunteers on the boards of the Foreign Service Youth Foundation and Seven United in Rwanda. He also served on the DC Board of Indego Africa.

Stuart earned his BA degree from Yale University in East Asian Studies. He is from Missouri and has lived, studied, and worked in Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador, Spain, Niger, Djibouti, Rwanda, Nigeria, China, and Japan. He is fluent in Spanish, conversational in French and rusty in Japanese. After hours, Stuart enjoys eclectic live music, iced coffee, traveling with friends, and writing about pop culture.

Jon Shepard

Jon previously led GDI’s Climate and Ecosystems work. He is now the Chief Strategy Officer of Emergent, a non-profit focused on tropical forest protection and incubated by GDI. Emergent has convened a coalition of governments and major corporations willing to commit >$1bn to catalyse a carbon markets-based approach to the preservation and restoration of these priceless natural assets. Before GDI, Jon conceived and set up a global non-profit unit at EY that worked with leading impact entrepreneurs in low and middle-income countries. Earlier in his career, Jon worked for Accenture, The Prince’s Trust – a leading youth development NGO in the UK – and was an infantry officer in the British Army.

Elizabeth VanDerWoude

Elizabeth is GDI’s CFO and the Treasurer of GDI U.S. and GDI’s subsidiary legal entities. In addition to leading finance and general operations across GDI, she also supports initiatives in launching their own organizations, and building policy, procedure, and systems to ensure they run effectively. Beyond her finance and operations roles, Elizabeth leads GDI efforts to identify and implement practical solutions to barriers to localizing development.

Elizabeth has experience managing finance, accounting, compliance, human resources, and planning at a range of non-profit organizations in positions focused on capacity development. Before joining GDI, she served as Senior Director of Finance and Accounting at NASTAD and as Vice President of Finance and Administration at Education for Employment. Elizabeth received her MBA from Georgetown University and studied both International Development and Accounting as an undergraduate.

Jason Wendle

Jason has 20 years of strategy and build experience in the social impact space. As a Director at GDI, he oversees the People on the Move portfolio of initiatives, which span across labor mobility, refugee economic inclusion, and combatting human trafficking. He plays the lead strategy role at Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP), having previously done so for the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS). Jason is guiding LaMP to turn a world-changing idea into concrete demonstrations supported by a robust and adaptive organization. He helped develop GFEMS’ strategy to deploy $80M to transform systems of slavery in high-prevalence sectors and grow the evidence base for the field. When he joined GDI, Jason launched and directed the Mastercard Foundation Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab, one of GDI’s efforts to define and shape the smallholder finance sector.

Before GDI, Jason helped establish and build the Nairobi office of Dalberg and its evaluation practice on the continent. Over seven years, he advised the world’s largest private foundations, donor countries, international institutions, African governments, Fortune 100 firms, and upstart innovators on achieving greater impact in agriculture, energy, technology, finance and investment, economic growth, and poverty reduction. Jason serves on the boards of Jibu, Justice Rising, and LaMP, and founded and led a church early in his career. He holds an MPA/ID from Harvard’s Kennedy School and has published and presented on migration, modern slavery, agricultural finance, impact investment, and impact measurement. Jason enjoys taking people, especially his kids, on outdoor adventures they didn’t know they needed.

For us, scalability and impact aren’t just a metric of success, they’re a criteria for support. We make big bets that can push the limits of our current systems, or outright transform them.

Our Funders

The first step to creating real change is believing that it’s possible. GDI appreciates the contributions from its funders whose support is instrumental in bringing innovative ideas to life.

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