Business Forecast
The Business Forecast is an informational resource on potential funding and partnership opportunities at USAID.
https://www.usaid.gov/business-forecast/search
Development Innovation Ventures (DIV)
Through DIV, USAID seeks to identify and rigorously test promising projects with the potential to significantly (rather than incrementally) improve development outcomes, and help replicate and scale projects that are proven successful. DIV expects its most successful of investments will have an accelerated growth path to reach tens of millions of beneficiaries worldwide within 10 years. DIV uses a tiered, evidence-based funding model to test ideas, gather evidence of what works, find failures quickly and cheaply, without long-term commitments, and continue to support only proven solutions.
Grand Challenges For Development
Grand Challenges for Development focus global attention and resources on specific, well defined international development problems, and promote innovative approaches, processes and solutions to solving them. They engage non-traditional solvers such as businesses, researchers, and scientists around critical development problems in a variety ways through partnerships, prizes, challenge grant funding, crowdsourcing, and more to identify innovations that work.
USAID has launched 9 grand challenges for development. For example:
Powering Agriculture
Launched in June 2012, Powering Agriculture: An Energy Grand Challenge for Development will overcome critical barriers to agricultural electric energy access through innovative clean energy technologies and financing mechanisms. The effort will bring global attention to the persistent energy access issues that confront farmers throughout the developing world in agricultural production, processing, and storage.
This Grand Challenge for Development encourages innovators to find new ways to bring clean energy to farmers through sustainable and scalable solutions that will create more and better quality food for farmers, their families, and their communities. It is also expected that these innovations will create new economic opportunities in agricultural communities in the developing world.
Global Development Alliance (GDA)
The Global Development Alliance is an innovative public-private alliance model for improving social and economic conditions in developing countries. It combines the assets and experience of strategic partners, leveraging their capital and investments, creativity, and access to markets, to solve complex problems facing government, business, and communities. Through 2006, USAID had put together more than 600 public-private partnerships, committing $1.5 billion and leveraging $4.8 billion of partner resources.