Founders Pledge
Global Health & Development Fund
The Global Health & Development Fund seeks to significantly improve the lives of the most vulnerable people by granting to high-impact projects working on global health and development.
What problem is the Global Health and Development Fund working on?
While many of us have a higher life expectancy than our parents and grandparents, and we expect to have greater wealth than generations before us, millions of people live in poverty, and billions more struggle to get by. They cannot access basic healthcare and vaccinations, making them far more vulnerable to deadly diseases. They cannot access quality education to strengthen their economic future.
What projects does the Global Health and Development Fund support?
The Global Health and Development Fund aims to:
- Significantly improve the lives of the world's most vulnerable people.
- Eliminate deaths from easily preventable disease.
- Support sustainable, systemic change.
Recent past recipients of grants from the Global Health and Development Fund include:
- Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative.
- Lead Exposure Elimination Project for its work to eliminate global lead poisoning.
- New Incentives to support childhood vaccinations in Nigeria.
- Family Empowerment Media to support work informing people in Nigeria about modern forms of contraception and addressing common misconceptions.
- The r.i.c.e. institute to support the Kangaroo Mother Care programme in hospitals in Uttar Pradesh, India.
See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations are allocated, past recipients, and plans for the future.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Global Health and Development Fund?1.
We previously included the Global Health and Development Fund on our list of recommendations because it is managed by the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only funds managed by grantmakers we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; while we expect to soon look into Founders Pledge as part of this more in-depth evaluator research, we haven’t yet. As such, we don't currently include this fund as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.