Social trust is eroding globally. There is an urgent need to rebuild trust and connections in communities. While dialogue is necessary, it’s often insufficient. Enter Tango, a virtual quiz game developed at Harvard University in partnership with GDI. Tango pairs Democrats and Republicans as teammates and turns bipartisanship into a competitive advantage, finding a scalable solution to restore trust and promote collaboration across lines of division. 

“It’s really the opposite of the nasty, divisive posting you find on social media,” says Tango co-creator Joshua D. Greene, co-author of a new study measuring the game’s impact, in Harvard Gazette.

The results, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, showed decreased partisan hostility, increased warmth, and even financial generosity between U.S. players from opposing parties. The authors found that the immediate effect was equivalent to reversing about 15 years of rising political polarization in American life. The game’s positive effects persisted for four months. 

Recently featured in the Boston Globe and Ologies with Alie Ward, Tango is an innovative tool designed to foster collaboration, mutual respect, and connectedness among individuals with differing beliefs and values. 

For higher education, Tango can be seamlessly integrated into student orientation, classrooms, student organizations, and other campus initiatives. It can foster collaboration and mutual understanding among students, helping them learn to respect differing viewpoints and work together despite disagreements. For companies, Tango can build team cohesion and create a united, more respectful work environment.

Contact Tango today to learn more about the research, see how Tango can integrate into your organization, and discuss opportunities for partnership.

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.

Follow us on LinkedIn for the latest on our work and sign up to receive future GDI updates directly to your inbox.

The Global Digital Health Monitor (GDHM), a resource stewarded by health.enabled and GDI, is being integrated into the World Health Organization (WHO) Data Portal to serve as the official digital health monitoring platform for WHO’s Global Initiative on Digital Health (GIDH). This move highlights the GDHM’s unique value as a tool for standardizing digital health frameworks, ensuring interoperability, and global monitoring of digital health transformation. 

GDHM serves as an interactive resource, empowering countries to prioritize and monitor their digital health ecosystems based on the WHO/ITU eHealth Strategy Toolkit’s seven fundamental pillars. These pillars include leadership and governance, strategy and investment, legislation, policy and compliance, services and applications, infrastructure, standards and interoperability, and workforce. The GDHM utilizes 23 indicators across these pillars, including cross-cutting areas, such as emerging technologies and equity, to enable countries to evaluate and advance their digital health capabilities.

To date, 80 countries, representing more than 40% of all countries globally, have assessed their digital health maturity through the GDHM. The tool plays a critical role in guiding health priorities and fostering regional and global collaboration through: 

• Monitoring and supporting the improvement of digital health quality at the country level
• Tracking progress towards comprehensive and integrated digital health systems
• Identifying areas of funding and technical assistance needs within and across countries
• Encouraging better alignment among policymakers, donors, and implementers in the digital health sector
• Providing transparency on digital health maturity to de-risk private sector investment at the country level

The “State of Digital Health 2024 Brief” shares an analysis of selected indicators from the 2024 GDHM survey submissions of 47 participating countries across all WHO regions. This brief serves as an interim report leading up to the more comprehensive “State of Digital Health Report,” which will be released later in 2025.

The GDHM is continuously seeking to broaden its insights and has set a goal to increase participation to 100 countries by the end of 2025. To learn how to contribute your country’s data to this critical global initiative aimed at improving health and well-being for all, contact info@digitalhealthmonitor.org. 

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.

Daraja – Shared Services Platform, a GDI initiative that aims to drive sustainable development in Africa by providing an efficient, risk-free, and impact-driven investment pathway for donors and philanthropists, held its first annual Leadership Workshop in Mombasa, bringing together funders and senior leadership teams of 20 local non-profits from various regions of Kenya. Daraja – Shared Services Platform provides specialized operational support to locally owned non-profits to strengthen their capacity and facilitate increased funding opportunities. By empowering and supporting collaboration with local organizations, Daraja is working towards a future where communities in the Global South are better equipped to take charge of their development.

The two-day workshop included a gala dinner, with Ndungu Kahihu, Executive Director of CAP Youth Empowerment Institute, as the chief guest. Mr. Ndungu offered a unique perspective on leadership within the Kenyan context and how to build an impactful and sustainable non-profit. Other speakers included Alice Gugelev, CEO of GDI Africa; Michael Mithika, a renowned leadership and governance specialist; Tania Ngima from the Livelihood Impact; Grace Wachori from ANDE, and Alice Ngigi, an experienced leadership and life coach. This experience solidified our goal to support funders in identifying and collaborating with locally led local non-profits.

We want to extend our heartfelt gratitude to GDI Africa, Jane Kelly from Vitol Foundation and the entire team at Vitol Foundation, and Elizabeth Cheung and her team from Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Your unwavering support over the last 18 months has been instrumental in our journey towards driving sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa. We are truly grateful for your partnership.

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.

GDI is coming up on its eighth year since our founding in 2014. We continue to be guided by our core values: we stand on integrity; we follow our curiosity; we’re doers, not talkers; we embrace taking risks; and we see strength in diversity.  

This year, we’ve made big pushes in new areas that we see as fundamental to addressing the most pressing global challenges, including climate, migration, inclusive societies, and localization – the latter, both with our portfolio and within GDI.  

Portfolio: Climate, Migration, Economic Opportunity, and Inclusive Societies 

On climate, we are continuing to support Emergent, a global trading platform to create a new marketplace in large-scale transactions of high-integrity carbon credits at the jurisdictional level, and are now launching the Resilient Water Accelerator, a multi-stakeholder platform that aims to address water security challenges and unlock climate financing to fund these projects in emerging markets.  

On migration, we’ve launched the Migrants Resilience Collaborative in India (working with internal migrants), Refugee Investment Network (refugees), Malengo and Labor Mobility Partnerships (educational and labor migrants), and the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (human trafficking). Recognizing that we are working on a portfolio of efforts that have siloed the various migration communities, we’ve launched a broader push around “People on the Move.” 

In the employment and livelihoods space, we’ve continued to build the Global Opportunity Youth Network, a significant effort to implement place-based, collaborative solutions to youth unemployment and underemployment around the world. GOYN’s Convening in Bogota was the highlight of this year and a testimony to the achievements of the network since its 2018 inception. In East Africa, the Village Enterprise Development Impact Bond exceeded targets, sustainably improving the livelihoods of 95,000 East Africans — including 70,000 women and children. Our work with the Kenyan government on the Kenya Social and Economic Inclusion Project (KSEIP) has started demonstrating the potential for positive transformation and uplifting of households out of extreme poverty. In the last 6 months, more than 7,000 participants have received a combination of training, support, asset grants, and mentorship. So far, the savings of the extreme poor has surpassed 7 million Kenyan shillings. KSEIP will generate evidence to inform the government’s continued investment in social economic inclusion.

Finally, with respect to building inclusive societies, our approach has been to support the foundations of those inclusive societies in a non-partisan and potentially transnational way. We’re launching Public Mind, which applies AI technologies to the conversations unfolding on social media to track, measure, and represent public opinion in a completely new way, and RedBrain BlueBrain (research working name), an intervention to improve attitudes and behavior across divergent, diverse perspectives – starting across red and blue America. 

Localization: Portfolio and GDI

Over the last year, we’ve explored how GDI can help accelerate the field to localize development. Our team has continued a thought leadership series on localizing development, unpacking the supply and demand barriers, and outlining a series of interventions. At the same time, we realized that we needed to do some introspection and consider how we demonstrate our own commitment to localization. We shared our assessment in a candid and transparent article representing where we are right now and where we need to go further. In our efforts to expand our global reach, we have formally launched our GDI South Asia office in India.

In 2022, we received remarkable support from our donors and partners preparing GDI for continued growth in service of our entrepreneurs, initiatives, and global systems change. While we have not promoted widely given our focus on empowering entrepreneurs and the people they serve, we are excited to share that we have been given a MacKenzie Scott Award. The unrestricted funding will be used to provide catalytic support to build GDI’s capacity and to continue our shift to be a global organization with deeper roots in the global south. We envision this funding helping to make GDI a better talent hub and engine, with funding going to sourcing talent for GDI and our initiatives, and potentially adding a broader leadership program for our initiative leads and their management teams.

What’s Next

We continue to expand the sourcing of our work and leadership as we restructure our governance structure. After starting in the US, we have more staff in the global south than the global north, and most of these people are from the countries and regions in which we work. You can learn more about our regional entities and many global career opportunities here.

As we look to next year, we remain strong believers in the capacity of humanity to address our most intractable and challenging problems. In 2023, we will share quarterly updates to inform you of our progress toward our mission of driving system-level change.

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.

Emergent is a non-profit intermediary acting between tropical forest countries and the private sector—creating a new marketplace in large-scale transactions of high-integrity carbon credits at the jurisdictional level.  Emergent believes we have a historic opportunity to bend the climate curve if we make forests worth more alive.

On this Earth Day, GDI-incubated Emergent and its partners launched the largest forest-focused public-private coalition in history to guarantee $1 billion in demand for carbon credits to protect the world’s tropical forests. Amazon, Nestlé, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline and Salesforce are among the companies supporting the new initiative, known as the LEAF Coalition.