DIV Emphasizes Producing Development Outcomes More Effectively and More Cost-Efficiently

How it Works:

DIV emphasizes producing development outcomes more effectively and more cost-efficiently while managing risks and obtaining leverage by focusing on scale, rigorous testing, and evidence. DIV is a mechanism for working with partners to identify and test potential development solutions, and helping to scale those that are proven to produce development impact.

■Breakthrough Solutions: DIV encourages entrepreneurs, innovators, businesses, academics, NGOs, and others to submit proposals for cost-saving development solutions. DIV seeks proposals with the potential to substantially improve development outcomes, rather than produce incremental changes.

■Cost-reduction and Leverage: DIV seeks applications that have ideas for addressing development challenges more effectively and more cheaply. DIV utilizes staged financing to maximize cost-effectiveness and minimize risk. In supporting projects with the potential to reach wide-scale, DIV also seeks to leverage other partners in the private, non-profit, and public sectors.

■Rigorous Testing and Evidence of Impact: The DIV model emphasizes testing potential solutions and rigorously evaluating impact - often through randomized control trials - in order to identify what works and what does not, and helping scale only those solutions proven to produce development outcomes.

■Scale: DIV is explicitly interested in development solutions that have the potential to reach wide-scale, i.e. tens of millions of beneficiaries.

Project Examples:

Examples of innovations that USAID/DIV is more likely to support include:

■New tools or technologies that more effectively execute against a development goal, and include testing to reach scale

■New approaches or processes that more effectively execute against a development goal and include testing to reach scale

■Innovations distributed at a price/service point that induces wide adoption (ideally within both developing countries and the United States)

■A rigorous evaluation that demonstrates the magnitude of development outcomes and the cost-effectiveness of a larger scale innovative project that will itself be funded by other partners (e.g. a Ministry of a foreign government, a NGO, etc.), and evidence determined by the evaluation will help the project reach scale.Examples of activities that are not suitable include:

■Projects that are standard development practice including new wells or additional text books

■Improvements that are incremental, as opposed to approaches expected to achieve a wide-scale significant increase in development outcomes and/or reduction in costs

■Approaches that do not scale internationally (unless adopted broadly in a highly populated country)Private sector business expansions unlikely to lead to significant development improvements

■Projects that bundle activities that are not individually innovative, unless a strong case is made for cost-effectiveness

■Basic research supported by others in US Government, foundations, and international entities

■An examination and testing of various hypotheses to determine a likely innovation, but that does not result in a tested and scalable innovation.

■Theoretical and/or descriptive socio-economic research that pushes the boundaries of academia but not linked to an innovation that has the potential to achieve development outcomes at scale