Children's Investment Fund Foundation

Who we are

The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is an independent philanthropic organisation headquartered in London with offices in Nairobi, New Delhi, Beijing and Ethiopia. CIFF works with a wide range of partners seeking to transform and empower the lives of poor and vulnerable children and adolescents in developing countries, with the ultimate goal of solving seemingly intractable challenges to ensure all children and adolescents have the chance to survive and thrive.

CIFF aims to play a catalytic role as a funder and influencer to deliver urgent and systemic change at scale. Areas of work include empowering girls and boys to control their sexual and reproductive health to avoid unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion and HIV/AIDS; improving children and mothers’ health and nutrition; preventing low birthweight babies; eliminating deaths from severe acute malnutrition, nested within a more integrated approach to childhood development; and deworming efforts to break transmission for good. CIFF’s child protection work focuses on ending child labour and sexual exploitation by enabling an environment that reduces vulnerability of communities and increases protection of children. The organisation’s climate portfolio is driven by a vision of a climate-safe future for today’s children and future generations that also bear the benefits of cleaner air, energy security and sustainable jobs.

Being a financially independent philanthropy, we are able to work in challenging areas in which others can’t. We often elect to work on what can be controversial issues which others won’t pursue. For example, CIFF is pro-choice with respect to women’s reproductive rights along with the prioritisation of access to reproductive information and to contraceptive choices. It is imperative to the CIFF family, therefore, that prospective candidates are aware of the issues we work on and embrace all our programmatic work with fully open minds to the huge number of ways in which we seek to empower young lives.

CIFF places significant emphasis on quality data and evidence. For most of its grants, CIFF works with partners to measure and evaluate progress to achieve large scale and sustainable impact. The organisation is committed to sharing as much information as possible about what they and their partners are learning.

Founded in 2002, CIFF employs over 170 professionals in England, Kenya, India, China and Ethiopia. CIFF strives to couple business acumen and principles with development experience and best practices to transform the landscape for children. It seeks to be the gold standard in grant making and foundation operations.