CharitiesFounders Pledge: Global Health and Development Catalytic Impact Fund
Founders Pledge: Global Health and Development Catalytic Impact Fund
Charity

Founders Pledge

Global Health and Development Catalytic Impact 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.

Global health and wellbeing
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What problem is the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund working on?

Compared to past generations, many of us can expect longer lives, greater wealth, and more opportunity. But for billions of people, those expectations remain out of reach. Poverty keeps families from accessing healthcare, vaccinations, and education — leaving them more vulnerable to disease and limiting their futures. The disruption of U.S. foreign aid in 2025 reinforced a need for a strategic fund that directs money toward sustainable, high-leverage solutions that multiply impact.

Like other effective funds recommended by GWWC, the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund works on the problem of how to best use limited resources to save and improve lives where the need is greatest. However, it specifically tackles a funding gap within the effective giving ecosystem: many of the highest-potential opportunities for impact are neglected because they are higher-risk.

The core problem is that a philanthropic focus on only the most certain, evidence-backed interventions can leave enormous potential on the table. The GHD CIF was designed to fill this strategic gap by explicitly seeking out these catalytic opportunities, a problem made more urgent by recent disruptions to international aid that demand more transformational, long-term solutions.

The fund is an evolution of the previous GHD Fund, with a new name to reflect its sharpened strategy

What projects does the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund support?

The GHD Catalytic Impact Fund aims to:

  • Significantly improve the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people
  • Prevent deaths from easily treatable and preventable diseases
  • Support systemic, sustainable change that creates lasting opportunity

Past recipients of grants from the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund include:

  • Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) - securing lead paint regulations across multiple countries
  • Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) - building permanent governance infrastructure that combats corruption
  • Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) - embedding technical support units in health ministries to help governments permanently restructure resource allocation during the aid crisis

The fund supports a portfolio of "catalytic" projects where a modest investment can unlock outsized returns, targeting 15x+ the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers for average grants. Using a risk-neutral approach that weighs high-risk, high-reward opportunities equally with more certain bets based on expected value, the fund identifies projects that:

  • Trigger systemic improvements, like embedding technical expertise within governments to improve the efficiency of national health systems (CHAI Technical Support Units); building permanent governance infrastructure that combats corruption (Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative); or supporting the development of a network of aligned organizations that can inform and shape the future of US foreign assistance (Center for Global Development)
  • Remove key bottlenecks, such as accelerating access to new drugs in low- and middle-income countries to combat antimicrobial resistance.
  • Crowd in capital, by providing early-stage funding to help promising organizations like the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) attract substantial follow-on investment.

See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations are allocated, past recipients, and plans for the future.

Unsure how a fund is different from a charity? See our page about why we recommend donors give to funds.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the GHD Catalytic Impact 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 and decided to rely on as part of our evaluator investigations. We looked into the Founders Pledge Global Health and Development Fund as part of our 2024 evaluator investigations and decided to not currently rely on it for our charity and fund recommendations. However, we still think FP GHDF is worth considering for impact-focused donors and we will continue to host the program on the GWWC donation platform. For more information, please see our report.


Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

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.