Earlier this year, The Agency Fund partnered with SEE Change Initiative at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to bring together researchers, practitioners and funders to think about Leveraging Personal Agency for International Development. Anita Shankar and her colleagues at the SEE Change have run

Economist Kaushik Basu has served at the highest levels of government and policy, as Chief Economist at the The World Bank and Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India. But his policy advice is always grounded in careful analysis of the decisions that ordinary people

How AI is transforming maternal healthcare Pregnancy is a major and complex journey. For first time moms, it is rife with unknowns. This can curtail women's ability to make agentic decisions. MomConnect helps expectant moms navigate this journey by getting them the personalised

One of the joys of working with our Strategy Fellows this year has been their ability to apply analytical rigor to important problems. Our next strategy fellow - Ishaan Bansal -exemplifies this. Working from Nairobi, this summer Ishaan is building a practical model for social

At Kabakoo Academies , the only essential modules are mindset-oriented. Because the team believes that only by cultivating a young person's agency do you allow them to make the most of their other skills. Co-founder yk explains more in our video👇

🌟 Grantee spotlight: We’re thrilled that Glific has announced the third Cohort of the Tech4Impact Chatbot Accelerator program. The program is designed to helps organizations develop chatbots quickly and by providing support from experts, a two-month Glific license, and $200 AI

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗟𝗟𝗠𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿 (𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗼 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺)⬇️ To understand the challenges of deploying LLMs in the social sector, last month we brought together more

To understand how, when and why development happens, we need to make sense of how ground-breaking approaches are being applied on the ground. And that’s what our brilliant Strategy Fellow, Kailash Raj Pandey , has been working on this summer. Kailash has been doing a deep dive with

At The Agency Fund, we’re interested in solutions that help people navigate concrete challenges. Very often people know what they want, whether that’s finding a secure home, supporting their children to thrive, or building a sustainable small business. Agency is about making sure

Do chatbots speak your language? Many of our partners work in communities that speak indigenous Indic and African languages. This creates a major challenge for the deployment of AI in the social sector, because the major LLM providers haven’t developed operating capacity in

🌟 Grantee Spotlight: Turn.io recently hosted an inaugural Chat for GenAI Accelerator Demo Day with over 160 attendees. The event featured ten trailblazing organizations that have developed novel chat solutions to advance global education, health, and economic mobility. Since

Introducing our Summer Fellows - Shelby Wailes Twenty years into the empirical revolution in development economics, we now have hundreds of studies. To convert the science into actionable insights, we need technical advisors who can find the "so what" across bodies of evidence.

💡How do scientific theories become practical tools that improve people's lives? This path is familiar in natural sciences but less so in social sciences. In our latest post, Zezhen Wu, Behavioral Scientist at The Agency Fund, shows how the the theory of personal agency, based

🚀Funding opportunity: Last week to apply for Fast Forward’s Startup Accelerator 2025 Are you a tech or AI-powered nonprofit founder on a mission to change the world? Then this one’s for you. Fast Forward 's Startup Accelerator program is specifically tailored for builders

🔎 Does career guidance impact students’ future success? New evidence on this below: In the mid-2000s in New Brunswick, a Canadian non-profit ran a randomized control trial with over 4,000 high school students. These students, primarily from lower-income families, were assigned

🔍 The legacy of Albert Bandura In our latest blog, Zezhen Wu, PhD, Behavioral Scientist at The Agency Fund, examines how social cognitive theory and “wise interventions” can equip students with the tools to overcome difficulties in a classroom. By focusing on students' sense of

🗺️ Stories are possible worlds. Nya Mona Muchemi from Shujaaz Inc talks about how relatable stories in the media can help people imagine possible futures, open up new meanings, and find purpose.