WASH for Life Partnership Evaluation

Findings from an evaluation of the partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene team and USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures

In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WSH) team partnered with USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) to establish WASH for Life, a $17 million pool of dedicated funding for innovative water, sanitation, and hygiene projects with the potential to scale. In 2017, as the partnership was ending, WSH commissioned Mathematica Policy Research to conduct an ex-post process evaluation to identify lessons learned from this unique collaboration This brief provides a summary of the WASH for Life partnership and the evaluation design; reviews the WASH for Life portfolio, including characteristics of applicants and grantees and an assessment of the degree to which WASH for Life succeeded in stimulating, testing, and scaling innovation; and reflects on WASH for Life’s influence on other innovation funders.