CharitiesFounders Pledge: Global Health and Development Fund
Founders Pledge: Global Health and Development Fund
Fund

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.

Global health and wellbeing
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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:

  • Ansh - Kangaroo Care for low-birthweight and preterm newborns in two additional hospitals
  • Taimaka - screening and treatment of children in the community management of acute malnutrition program in Nigeria
  • Project IMPALA - assessing IMPALA, a vital signs monitoring system designed specifically for neonates and children at hospitals within LMIC
  • HealthLearn - increasing capacity of newborn and antenatal care online training program for community health workers
  • Pure Earth - researching lead-contaminated cookware for the purpose of designing new mitigation strategies
  • 1DaySooner - advocating to speed up the roll out of the malaria vaccine

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 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 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.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.