"Our hope is that CIFF’s journey will be useful for all
who aim to make development more impactful."

CIFF’s current strategy for children was developed throughout 2008 and began implementation in earnest in 2009. With an overarching devotion to high impact funding for children, there are now three central tenets to CIFF’s approach. The first is clarity around success — articulating clearly the impacts we seek overall and precision around how individual grants provide a highly strategic path to these. The second is the explicit use of data — guiding CIFF’s investments based on facts about where the most salient opportunities for children exist, establishing explicit programme targets premised on existing evidence or a sound hypothesis and measuring ongoing progress towards these objectives and ultimate success with reliable data. The third is active learning and adaptation of strategy within each programme, as well as within CIFF, to better optimise impact.
...
CIFF recognises that our approach is a substantial divergence from the norm of development funding. The truth is that implementing this strategy is proving exciting, challenging and, often, uncomfortable. We recognise many outside the organisation are skeptical that a donor can successfully marry the acumen and discipline of the private sector with the best thinking and evidence of what works in development.
...
Our hope is that CIFF’s journey will be useful for all who aim to make development more impactful.

Jamie Cooper-Hohn, CEO
The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation

[ From the ‘Letter from the Chief Executive’ in the CIFF Activities Report 2009 ].