100 projects financed: FID behind the scenes

Ability to encourage innovative approaches to development by supporting fresh solutions that drive change is one of FID's key features. The fund designates a team of investment officers to identify the solutions they consider to be the most relevant and monitor the projects funded.

Investment officer Arthur Sagot-Duvauroux highlights the Labhya project in India and its method focusing on mental well-being to address the challenges public school children face when learning. He worked on this project for two years, and it resonates with him because of "its ability to think and act from a child's perspective, which makes it possible to understand needs better and design educational approaches that are more focused on mental well-being and self-confidence". He learned a lot from this project, which "also speaks to challenges related to education in France".

Arthur Sagot-Duvauroux (second from the right)

Impact evaluation is the focal point of the FID mission. The counterfactual impact evaluation method is used to rigorously measure how effective the innovations financed are.

"I feel that this encounter between quantitative economic methods and social issues is one of the organization's trademarks", explains Mélodie Beaujeu, Results and Learning Dissemination Officer. She joined FID in 2025, keen to contribute to sharing a culture of impact which resonated with her personally.

Anushka Chawla joined the FID team in 2022 as an Investment and Impact Officer to work towards strengthening the impact measurement of chosen projects as well as the fund's effectiveness. "FID asks teams to thoroughly measure their solutions' impact to test the extent to which they can improve quality of life for millions of people. Along the same lines, FID has also developed its own performance evaluation framework to evaluate its portfolio's impact just as thoroughly". What is its flagship project? Impact evaluation of a program to raise police awareness of gender-based violence in India, through theater. She started working on this project on her first day at FID, and it left an impression. She elaborates: "It correlated with the dissertation I had just finished on gender inequalities between men and women in India".

Anushka Chawla

100 projects have been financed thanks to a multidisciplinary team of experts working together. Bao Siong is an operational management officer who receives all the applications via the application platform. "I receive a stream of hundreds of proposals each month and my role is to assess each of them on an equal footing. It is a meticulous, detailed task but one that is vital because our aim is to be an inclusive, open fund".

Bao mentions that the number of applications FID receives is rising, a major challenge to take up, but that "the mission is really worth it. We receive applications for innovative, ambitious projects, and it's fascinating!"