🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

CLOSING SOON: The Agency Fund open call for grant funding There’s just one week left to respond to our latest open call for applications for grant funding. The closing date is Thursday, October 31st at 11.59PM Pacific Time. We anticipate having at least $1 million in awards

In the social sector, we often talk about putting people at the center of development. But how do we design processes that deliver on that promise? In our latest blog, Strategy Fellow Ishaan Bansal explores how user-centered design can fuel successful innovation, by ensuring

There's a ton of psychological research that tells us people respond better to stories than to raw statistics. When information is presented to us through role models — people like us navigating contexts like ours — we're more likely to take it onboard when we make decisions.

Where Can AI Add Value in Career Development Coaching? 🚀 A new white paper by Sarah Shaw and Abby Lupi evaluates Coach, an AI-powered career tool from CareerVillage.org . While not an RCT, the study offers valuable early signals on how AI can enhance career readiness. ✅ Most

To develop approaches that work in complex contexts, organizations need to continuously test, learn, and adapt. In our latest blog, Strategy Fellow Ishaan Bansal dives into the "test-and-learn" approach that powers user-centered innovation. By centering beneficiaries’

Attending the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) conference next year? Join the Intervention Science Preconference. The event will dig into the theory and evidence behind groundbreaking interventions, highlight new data, and create opportunities to

Riza Santoyo, an informal waste collector in Quezon City, Philippines, used to work almost 24 hours a day to feed her children. Not able to afford her own work tools, she relied on a rented bike and cart to transport waste to the junk shop. Things began to shift when Riza joined

📢CLOSING SOON: Funding Opportunity in from the WAM Foundation 📢 The WAM Foundation’s current funding call will close on 22 November. The Foundation is accepting applications for two exciting Requests for Proposals (RFPS): 🔹 Targeted Funding RFP: Focuses on three underfunded

In both policy and research, agency tends to be understood in terms of personal freedom: the absence of social constraints. The problem with this view is that it misses perhaps the most important aspect of human agency, which is that it is built socially. This presents us with

Can life skills training increase girls’ agency, even in contexts of deeply entrenched gender disadvantage? Between 2016 and 2018 researchers Eric Edmonds, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Jessica Leight ran a randomized trial with 2,459 girls in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, where

💡Our friends at Youth Impact have produced an excellent guide to using A/B testing for social sector impact! In the last few decades, growing use of RCTs has helped steer investment towards interventions with the greatest social return. But while RCTs establish broad

We often see agency framed as freedom—freedom from constraints. But this view misses how agency actually develops. Here's why👇 For socially privileged people, it's easy to take a sense of agency for granted. If you've always had access to role models and opportunities, if

🤝 How do we foster open source mindsets in social sector tech? At The Agency Fund, our strategy for building the development tech stack is rooted in openness and collaboration. When we accelerate promising deployments of LLMs, user engagement solutions or back-end automations

Modern development economics is based on a model in which the intervention stays fixed. You build an intervention, rigorously test to see if it works, then try to scale it. This can be thought of as a “nail it, then scale it” approach. As a model it has well understood virtues,

The Agency Fund operates on the thesis that social and psychological supports can unlock remarkable outcomes for individuals and their communities. But around the world, societies are struggling to deliver mental health support at the scale required. In our latest blog,