Times of uncertainty call for courage and imagination. As we reflect on our work at GDI this past year, we are especially proud of the role our global organization has played in helping ensure innovative ideas have the support required to take root and drive the social impact sector forward.

While it is, without question, a time of reckoning and seismic change – with practices and institutions we once viewed trustworthy and steadfast now in sway – as an incubator, we are focusing on the pathways that disruption can open. 

There are encouraging signs where local solutions are taking center stage, and investors are moving to meet them. For our part at GDI, we are committed to re-imagining systems and incubating solutions to ensure they serve the most vulnerable communities and create real opportunities for the generation ahead.

In the past six months, we’ve launched 12 new investments that are exploring solutions to eliminate lead poisoning, ramp up local climate mitigation and adaptation & resilience efforts globally, and improve equity and trust building in the U.S., among a range of other significant cross-cutting efforts in our pipeline. This is the first step toward our five-year goal to launch 30 ground-breaking solutions by 2030.

Below, we’ve invited each of our Global Partners to share their reflections from this past year and preview what they see on the horizon in 2026:

GDI Africa 

In a year defined by rapid change and complexity, GDI Africa found both clarity and opportunity. Across the sector, long-held assumptions were being questioned, models challenged, and the voices closest to communities elevated. For us, this meant pausing to evaluate where systems are shifting and adjusting our approach accordingly – advancing youth pathways, ecosystem solutions, and catalytic economic innovation. Our leadership and governance also strengthened, with new Executive Directors for the Economic Development and Investment Council (EDIC) and NurtureFirst, portfolio leads in Agriculture and Finance, a Chief Operating Officer, and new voices on our Board.

The Global Opportunity Youth Network (GOYN) is now present in nine countries and 17 communities across Africa, India, and Latin America, with over 700 partners engaging more than 800,000 youth towards socio-economic wellbeing. In our three earliest Indian communities, over 60,000 youth have joined the labor force with clear pathways to government adoption. The NurtureFirst team trained more than 800 home-based childcare providers.

In Mombasa, the Tourism Innovation Lab launched ten youth-led ventures, supported 50 entrepreneurs, created 120 jobs, and earned recognition for excellence in execution. AgriAdvance piloted market-driven value chains, EDIC moved €7.5M toward potential funding, and Daraja mobilized $3.1M for six nonprofits. Across our initiatives, we continued testing commercial and investment-focused approaches, showing how catalytic funding, strong partnerships, and local innovation can unlock sustainable systems change.

As we look ahead, we carry forward both the humility this moment demands and the imagination required to build systems, policies, and innovations that drive measurable, lasting impact.

GDI Americas

Beneath this year’s many reckonings is a crisis of trust – in information, in governments, in businesses. Trust isn’t optional; it’s the bedrock that makes our collective thriving possible. And when it fails, systems fail – in health, climate, migration, housing, and education.

A crisis of trust demands more than mending – it demands reinvention. That’s the work GDI was built for. And this year, our commitment deepened in powerful ways. Alongside compelling entrepreneurs, we are:

• Building an impact investing platform that will restore working forest ecosystems in British Columbia in partnership with First Nations and local communities;
• Scaling a responsible AI-enabled platform that helps courts deliver timely justice in India by reducing case timelines by 30-50% – a core pillar of public trust;
• Scaling an evidence-based model for bridging political divides in the U.S. and around the world — using a cooperative game designed to spark connection;
• Restoring assets and dignity to Detroiters affected by one of the largest government seizures of Black wealth;
• Mobilizing a movement to eliminate lead poisoning, which profoundly affects health, education, and livelihoods for one in three children in low and middle-income countries;
• Opening migration pathways that multiply incomes 4-20x through blended finance.

This year, we also welcomed Hayling Price, who will lead our growing U.S. work in community wealth-building.

Here’s to rebuilding trust and reimagining the systems our communities deserve in the year ahead.

GDI South Asia

GDI South Asia is uniquely positioned to address the gap between growing global challenges and the insufficient capital flowing to innovative, systemic solutions in the region. This past year was a significant one for our work. We had the privilege of building and deepening relationships with funders, partners, board members, and collaborators in the ecosystem. Our ongoing initiatives in climate, health, and livelihoods made meaningful progress, and we launched new initiatives in the areas of AI for impact, gender, and agriculture. 

A common thread across each of these was exploration, considering our local context: How do we design interventions to address core challenges and not just their symptoms? How do we amplify rather than replicate the work done by those who have come before us? And, most importantly, how do we move rapidly from idea to action and learn through doing? Several of our flagship initiatives embodied this spirit over the year:

The Resilient Water Accelerator, which aims to catalyze public and private capital to invest in climate-resilient water security opportunities, solidified its institutional architecture as an independent subsidiary of WaterAid and made significant strategic advancements in Bangladesh and Nigeria in the garments and municipal sectors, respectively. Our Grassroots Circular Waste Collaborative (GCWC) initiative, supported by IKEA Foundation and Laudes Foundation, made strides in designing a blended finance facility for nano- and micro-entrepreneurs in the waste sector.

Our health portfolio, anchored by Leapfrog to Value (L2V), has expanded in 2025 to design innovative solutions in primary healthcare and join the global effort to eliminate lead poisoning. The India value-based care coalition, facilitated by L2V, launched the first-of-its-kind strategic roadmap to shift India’s health system from volume to value. 

We’re optimistic that the foundation and relationships we’re building will continue to flourish and contribute to a more equitable and resilient future for the region.

Voyage 

At Voyage, GDI’s East Asia Global Partner, two initiatives stand out this year. The first initiative is reimagining an approach to urban poverty alleviation by adapting the Nobel Prize-winning graduation approach for urban settings. JC PROJECT LIFT, summarized in this report, aims to serve 14,000 families across 24 transitional housing sites in Hong Kong. The project will be evaluated through a randomized control trial that will review its longitudinal impact, including its impact on income generation, employment, savings behavior, and ultimately on poverty reduction. 

The second initiative is reimagining how to grow and professionalize domestic philanthropy in Asia – increasingly relevant in a post-aid era and in a region where domestic philanthropy dwarfs cross-border philanthropy (e.g., annual domestic philanthropy estimated at ~USD 35bn in China and ~14bn in India). Voyage leads the Research Secretariat of the Commission on Asian Philanthropy. The Commission, which brings together the expertise of 13 leading philanthropic institutions in Asia, is undertaking a three-year research-to-action and institution-building effort. The Commission’s early-stage research in Asia has identified five philanthropic growth models from domestic sources across Asia: corporate-led, community-led, faith-based, state-led, and high-net-worth-individual-led. Ultimately, this Commission aims to accelerate the quantity, quality, and impact of Asian philanthropy towards more inclusive and sustainable societies. 

Looking Ahead

As we look to the coming year, we remain strong believers in the capacity of the many great thinkers and doers across our sector who approach each day as another opportunity to create positive change around the world. 

To our global network of partners, entrepreneurs, and team members, thank you for your conviction and your continued efforts. We look forward to an impactful 2026.

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Kicking off 2025, GDI has one new exciting development to start our year. Our board recently approved GDI Founder, Andrew Stern, to shift to devote his full-time capacity to the Global Coordinator role across our GDI entities. Chintan Maru, who many of you know as one of our leading senior Strategy and Build Directors, will be appointed to serve as CEO of the GDI Americas entity as of February 1st, 2025.

From the more than 80 social impact initiatives GDI has launched in the last ten years, two lessons on leadership stand out. First, organizations need the right leader at the right moment. A terrific founder may not be the right person to lead an organization in perpetuity. As an organization matures, new leadership capabilities are needed to get the organization to the next level. Second, we need both local leadership and global collaboration. The movement to localization should not come at the expense of global collaboration.

Our leadership transition reflects these learnings. Over the past few years, Andrew has played a coordinating role in helping structure and build out our global partners, alongside managing our GDI Americas entity. As Global Coordinator, he will facilitate collaboration across our global partners in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The role will allow our independent global partners to continue to drive their local strategies with a common purpose.

This shift will put Chintan formally into a leadership role that he began playing over the past year with GDI Americas and leverage his strong people leadership skills to continue to cultivate our talent. Under Chintan’s leadership, the strategy of GDI Americas will have a deeper emphasis on local social impact, including work on racial repair, inclusive societies, and democracy. It also includes an ongoing commitment to global work where the Americas has an outsize responsibility, such as migration opportunities and climate mitigation.

Thank you for being a valuable part of our journey as we continue turning good ideas into great social impact. We look forward to continuing our work together.

About Chintan Maru

Chintan Maru is CEO of GDI Americas and serves as Board Chair of GDI South Asia. Chintan previously served as the Managing Director at GDI Americas, where he led a portfolio of initiatives focused on compassion, dignity, and kindness.

He is the Founder and Principal of Leapfrog to Value, which is expanding financing for compassionate and high-quality health systems. Chintan serves on the founding team and board of the Dignity Restoration Project, a frontrunner in the American race reparations movement. He co-founded Oxygen Hub, a franchise business expanding oxygen access across Africa.

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.

This year marked a special milestone as the Global Development Incubator reached its tenth year developing solutions that spark sustainable and inclusive development. Curiosity has been our compass this past decade, leading us to new discoveries, perspectives, and achievements. Most importantly it has cultivated a community with incredible changemakers with whom we are proudly partnering to put transformative local ideas into action around the world.

Since our launch in 2014, our team of social impact entrepreneurs and partners has launched over 80 initiatives in areas including climate, access to healthcare and education, financial inclusion, and labor mobility, among others. Our initiatives share a similar DNA, set of values, and ambition for large-scale impact. We have leveraged over $800 million in capital to support these ventures from committed public and private donors and investors.

Community is an important focus of our work. Here are examples of community-building efforts this past year:

Moving Toward an Inclusive Society

We launched two new initiatives centered on moving toward an inclusive society that support cohesive, resilient communities. Tango, a cooperative quiz game, is bringing Americans with different political viewpoints together to reduce partisanship. The effort is based on the evidence-based research developed by Professor Joshua Greene from Harvard Psychology, which has shown sustained improvements in goodwill across divides. The Dignity Restoration Project (DRP) is building the operating infrastructure to support racial repair in the United States; the work starts in Detroit where DRP aims to compensate and restore the dignity of residents who lost their homes due to unlawful property tax assessments.

In Africa and Asia, we piloted interventions that are influencing policies and practices to support under-served communities – including families living under the poverty line, caregivers, people with disabilities, and migrant workers. Kenya’s Social Economic Inclusion Program, adopted by the Kenyan government this past year, will improve the delivery of critical safety net programs (including cash transfers and hunger prevention activities) to reach more vulnerable communities throughout the country in years to come. NurtureFirst, an initiative supporting home-based childcare (HBCC) providers has had early success putting quality standards in place in three counties in Kenya that will guide local providers to enhance their caregiving practices to promote optimal early childhood development. The Disability Impact Partners, which aims to improve access to assistive technologies (such as hearing aids, wheelchairs, and prosthetics) for patients in lower and middle-income countries, is making strides in creating partnerships between product developers and distributors and building a network of investors.

Cultivating Partnerships to Tackle Complex Challenges

Our work this past year brought together diverse research, policy, funding, and implementing partners to advance solutions to complex challenges affecting community health. In 2024, GDI partnered with Open Philanthropy to inform their global lead elimination strategy for their $100M Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF). Through this work, GDI is developing an actionable plan for governments, multilateral agencies, and implementing NGOs to systematically measure and mitigate lead poisoning in some of the most contaminated consumer goods at the global level and in several of the highest-burdened countries. The team engaged with USAID, The World Bank, WHO, and UNEP in advancing and collaborating with the global community to build a strategy for lead elimination. In 2025, the team is planning to propose several Discovery efforts that would inform the launch of new initiatives that will bring the strategy to life.

As part of our overall climate thesis, and with the support of the IKEA Foundation and Laudes Foundation, GDI South Asia is incubating the Circularity platform, offering support forformal and informal waste enterprises and initiatives across the value chain to ensure it reaches the hands-on implementers of waste management in India that can enhance social inclusion through improved livelihoods and entrepreneurship. This uniquely falls at the nexus of climate, entrepreneurship, livelihoods, and gender – with a particular impact on the most marginalized communities involved in the work.

Expanding Our Team

We welcomed several new members to our team in 2024 to support our growing goals including Brian Shillinglaw, a Managing Director who will lead a portfolio of initiatives focused on climate mitigation and carbon removal, and Melissa Janis who will serve as our Resource Mobilization lead. Our teams in Africa and South Asia continue to grow and expand their efforts as well. We invite you to explore our career page for new opportunities to join our team in the year ahead.

Looking Ahead

In the coming years, we aim to double our early-stage incubation efforts to tackle emerging issues – with curiosity and community, as ever, at the heart of our work. Thank you, our global network of partners, entrepreneurs, and team members, for your continued efforts and we look forward to an impactful 2025.

We are hopeful.

In a year of daunting news – devastating conflict, sliding toward climate catastrophe, inclusive societies at risk around the world – we remain optimistic. We’ve now been at this for almost 10 years. As of last year, we’ve launched almost 70 initiatives, more than 25 of which have already graduated, and raised almost three-quarters of a billion dollars for these efforts. As our portfolio matures, we are starting to see what we’ve always intended for the GDI model – impact at scale.

Working Toward Impact at Scale

In Africa, Aceli is building an inclusive agricultural finance market, moving from catalyzing one to almost three loans per day, many of which are climate-smart and gender- and youth-inclusive. In India, the Migrants Resilience Collaborative has helped 3 million migrants access social protection and is on a pathway to reach 10 million. Expanding from 5 to more than 30 cities, our Global Opportunity Youth Network is creating a place-based employment model for youth often excluded from opportunity. And at a global level, Emergent facilitated its first trades worth $60m to protect forests with Costa Rica and Ghana, opening up a pathway for other countries to reverse deforestation.

Addressing Current and Emerging Challenges

At the same time, we continue to search for new social impact solutions to address the current and emerging crises. We’re building a climate adaptation and resilience portfolio with initiatives in resilient water infrastructure development, circularity and waste management, and bamboo value chains, among other areas. We’re exploring how to scale efforts to create more inclusive societies, from a dignity restoration platform in Detroit to a cooperation intervention to bridge differences in the US, Israel, or India. And, we are exploring ways to address some of the human consequences of conflict and fragile states, particularly child trauma.

Building the GDI Way

Behind all of this, we continue to build GDI as a great platform to serve entrepreneurs and launch transformational development ventures. We formally launched our GDI South Asia partner in India, consolidating already existing teams and initiatives to better serve the local needs. In November, we brought our global team of almost 75 people from around the world together in Kenya to connect, learn, and share approaches around what we are calling the “GDI Way”. At its core, it is our unique approach to creating impact at scale through systems change with a comprehensive incubation approach and accountability for achieving results together – and anchored in a set of values where we believe humble, diligent work can create change.

We remain hopeful and look forward to partnering in the year ahead.

Two of the most frequent questions we get from entrepreneurs upon creating their new organizations are “What policies do I need?” and “What template should I use for them?”

At GDI, we incubate transformational development ventures to build and scale the next generation of social impact solutions. From climate to agriculture, health to economic inclusion, GDI builds across sectors to drive game-changing impact at scale. In the initial phases of the incubation process, entrepreneurs may request support from GDI to establish foundational infrastructure and ensure legal compliance and alignment with best practices and part of this support may include policy development for new organizations.

Typically, organizational policy development occurs shortly after the initiative has been incorporated as an independent legal entity. Unfortunately, while there are several policy templates available on the Internet, they are often of limited utility without considering how they should be customized to meet the needs of the particular organization adopting them. The question of which policies are needed and what their specific content should be tends to require a nuanced approach. While there is no easy checklist for policies that might be necessary for each individual organization, we can provide a framework to evaluate which ones might be suitable and what level of detail is appropriate for their organization. The following provides new nonprofit organizations registered in the United States with an approach to determine which policies they will need and the appropriate level of detail, based on (in order of importance) legal requirements, donors, and their own organizational risk tolerance.

Legal Requirements

First and foremost, the initiative should consult with legal counsel to determine whether federal or state laws require their organization to have specific policies and, if so, the minimum required components. In most cases, these will be identified during the organizational registration phase, with policies such as conflict of interest, whistleblower, or document retention tailored to the specific federal or state-level requirements, depending on where the organization is registered and/or doing business. Your organization may decide to customize specific processes to help staff comply with the policies, but this is one area where entrepreneurs are well served to invest in legal counsel to ensure they meet minimum state and/or federal laws governing the types of policies necessary and the specific provisions required. 

Donor Requirements

After ensuring your organizational policies meet minimum legal standards, the entrepreneur should next consider the extent to which their policies need to align with their donors’ requirements. For instance, an organization that receives (or intends to receive) funding from the U.S. government might align their procurement policy with U.S. government thresholds on competition for agreements, or they might use U.S. government per diem rates in their travel policy. On the other hand, organizations that receive their funding from private foundations or philanthropists may adopt policies that are less stringent while still meeting their organizational needs. For example, whereas the conditions required to issue a subcontract without competing it are significantly higher for U.S. government-funded organizations, they may be more relaxed for organizations that receive funding only from private foundations.

Organizational Activities and Risk Tolerance

The final, and perhaps the most nuanced, areas for consideration when developing policies are “what kind of activities does your organization perform” and “what is the overall risk tolerance of your governance or leadership bodies”. To the first point, organizations might ask themselves any of the following questions:

• Will you have employees?
• Do you interact with individuals who may be considered part of a “vulnerable population” group? 
• Do you conduct research that requires study of or participation of humans or animals?
• Do you send money or contract with entities outside of the U.S.?
• Do you collect or store personally identifying information (name, address, date of birth, government-issued identification number, etc.)?
• Do you issue grants to individuals or organizations?
• Do you have staff that expect to travel?
• Do your activities involve business-sensitive information that you need to protect (e.g. revenue-generating intellectual property or trade secrets)?
  

The answers to these and other similar questions will help determine the types of policies an organization should consider adopting to ensure consistency and appropriate and ethical behavior from the staff. For instance, if you do not intend to issue grants as part of your work, you are unlikely to need to prioritize a subaward/grant management policy. On the other hand, if your staff will work directly with indigenous groups in conservation efforts, you might seriously consider adopting a robust safeguarding policy to ensure that your representatives are acting within international norms and best practices to protect vulnerable populations. Once you have determined which policies are needed, you may find a number of templates through a quick Google search or through professional organizations, such as Humentum. You should review these templates carefully and customize them based on the aforementioned considerations (i.e. legal and donor requirements) and based on your risk tolerance, as outlined below.

Finally, entrepreneurs should consider organizational risk tolerance (and the potential administrative burden associated with that level of risk tolerance) to determine if and how specific policies should be developed. Typically, this involves assessing the overall risk to the organization (in terms of the probability and impact of a problem occurring) and the extent to which you would like to minimize the risk. If your organization is particularly risk-averse in an area, you might build your policies in a way that drastically reduces or minimizes the risk. However, organizations and entrepreneurs should be mindful that efforts to minimize (or eliminate) risk often come with significant administrative burdens. To illustrate this, let’s take the example of a procurement policy as it relates to setting competition thresholds for contracts. 

Dollar thresholds in a procurement policy establish specific competition requirements depending upon the amount of the proposed contract. In addition to ensuring that contractor costs are allowable to your donors, these thresholds and their corresponding competition requirements reduce the risk of potential conflicts of interest and help to ensure that organizational resources are used in a responsible manner (i.e. that the organization is receiving the best value for money on the purchase). If your donors do not have their own requirements or competition thresholds, organizations may use the following considerations to determine their requirements based on their own risk tolerance or administrative capacity:

• What is your organizational budget? Organizations with smaller budgets may decide to set their competition thresholds lower to ensure that all purchases receive multiple quotes and are scrutinized carefully to identify the best value for money.
• What is the average amount of your purchases? If your organization routinely purchases lower-dollar-value items or services, you may determine that the risk of waste or fraud is relatively minor and set your lowest threshold accordingly.
• How common are your purchases? Organizations that regularly purchase products that are widely available may not feel the need to solicit multiple quotes each time. For instance, if your organization routinely purchases laptops, the administrative effort it takes to search out multiple quotes may not result in significant cost-savings. Conversely, if you are looking for an expert advisor with niche expertise, you may not be aware of the market rate for such experts and therefore it would be wise to gather multiple quotes to ensure you are receiving the best price. 
• How robust is your conflict of interest policy and how familiar are your staff with the policy? If you are particularly worried that your staff may engage contractors with whom they have a conflict of interest, you may set your competition thresholds lower to guarantee multiple quotes. Relatedly, you may require a procurement committee of several members at lower-dollar thresholds to prevent a single staff member from misdirecting contracts.
• In what geographies do you normally operate? If you routinely purchase goods and services in areas with higher costs, it may be worthwhile to increase your procurement thresholds to reduce the administrative burden of soliciting multiple quotes. On the other hand, if your purchases are in areas with lower costs, it might be worthwhile to adjust your procurement thresholds down to ensure that you receive enough quotes representative of the market. 
• What is your administrative capacity and how does that relate to your risk tolerance? Smaller organizations may decide that the administrative burden of soliciting and reviewing multiple quotes outweighs the risk of fraud or waste. In these cases, the organization may establish higher procurement thresholds or less stringent requirements at lower price levels to maximize efficiency.

This represents just one example where a policy and its implementation may vary widely depending on both the types of activities involved and the organization’s risk tolerance. An organization’s policies are a reflection of its values and priorities and, as such, should be developed in that context. 

Key Takeaways

As you can see, the answers to “What policies does my organization need” and “What template should I use” are not straightforward, nor are they the same for every organization. The policy needs of your organization will vary tremendously based on where it is registered, the types of donors that support it, and the kinds of programs offered; and while templates can be useful in offering an overall framework and starting point, they require significant customization based both on the aforementioned considerations and the organization’s overall approach to risk management. 

While selecting and developing organizational policies is inherently unique to each organization, the above framework may help you in determining what works best for your particular circumstances. Entrepreneurs and organizations should keep in mind that policies are developed at a moment in time and they may (and should) evolve as the organization evolves. They should be reviewed on a regular basis and entrepreneurs should not be afraid to change them if they are not serving the organization’s needs. With the exception of the legal requirements, policies are amended just as easily as they are created so you should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.