Devex Invested: The view from Skoll in a post-foreign aid world

Anxious, courageous, or is it just “bravado”? Our man on the ground at last week’s Skoll World Forum has the latest on how social entrepreneurs are playing the U.S. foreign aid cuts.

“It’s still a disaster but it’s no longer a calamity,” one CEO told Devex Business Editor David Ainsworth in Oxford. That seemed to sum up the mood as participants digested the near-to-final list of canceled USAID projects and a rough plan for how U.S. aid might be delivered in future.

Jeff Skoll himself made his first appearance on stage in several years. His foundation created an emergency fund in response to the U.S. cuts and increased spending by 30%.

As John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, said: “I think it’s blindingly obvious that everyone must do more in this moment.” His organization is increasing spending from 5% of its endowment to at least 6%.

Some were gung-ho in the new normal.

“We’re going to reorder the powers that be,” said Neera Nundy, an Indian American whose nonprofit, Dasra, supports other organizations in India. “It’s not going to be the global north that does it. It’s not going to be USAID. It’s going to be us.”

Others were less fired up. Remember: The annual spending of top foundations totals about $11 billion, a fraction of the $65 billion previously provided by the United States alone.

“I read these comments saying Africans are better off without USAID,” said one delegate, who asked not to be named. “It’s just bravado, I’m afraid.”

Read: 6 things we learned at the Skoll World Forum 2025

See also: Big foundations say it's time to increase giving

Related: Will USAID cuts bring new opportunities for the global south?

DFI technical assistance explained

Simon Meier, director of BII Plus, the technical assistance branch of British Investment International, joined a Devex event last week for a rare look at how the U.K.’s DFI structures its technical assistance, what types of partnerships it supports, and how organizations can position themselves to get involved.

The entry points for NGOs, advisory firms, and consultancies are real — but not always obvious, Devex Pro Funding Editor Raquel Alcega writes.

Watch: How companies and aid implementers can engage with BII Plus (Pro)

+ Not yet a Devex Pro member? Start your 15-day free trial today to access all our expert analyses, insider insights, funding data, events, and more. Check out all the exclusive content available to you.

The view from Somalia and Norway

It’s not too late to join today’s event with Hodan Osman, the governor of the Somali Development and Reconstruction Bank, on how to build sustainable local funding mechanisms and more. Register now for the event: Financing development's future? Pro briefing with Hodan Osman.

Plus, on April 22, join us for an event with Marianne Jønsberg, senior manager for business support at Norfund, who will break down how Norway’s DFI structures and deploys technical assistance. Save your spot now for the event: Inside Norfund’s business support.

If you can’t attend to any of these events, register anyway, and we’ll send you a recording.

Orange’s bright future

We caught up with Natasha Garcha, senior director of innovative finance at Impact Investment Exchange, or IIX, in Sydney last month on the sidelines of the 2025 Impact Investment Summit Asia Pacific.

Inspired by orange being the color of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality, the Orange Bond Initiative launched by IIX brings a gender lens to impact investing. A first IIX orange bond in 2022 on women’s livelihoods has been followed by others, including the IKEA Foundation-backed Refugee Impact Bond in Jordan in 2023, where 70% of the target beneficiaries are women-owned microenterprises. Check out the full IIX-certified list here.

And there are more on the way.

“There is one that we’re doing, which will be happening in June, which will look at South and Southeast Asia,” Garcha said. “There's one happening in East Asia by another corporate, and that's very exciting, and then there is the government of Bangladesh and the government of Indonesia both embedding orange in their broader sovereign frameworks.“

The few orange bonds so far have been around the $100 million mark, which Garcha said is capable of attracting some mainstream investors. But it is the potential sovereign uptake that has her most excited as “those bonds have the potential to be significantly larger.”

The Orange Movement of those committed to gender-lens investing aims to mobilize $10 billion by 2030, but Garcha said, “a couple of companies in Indonesia have already said they can do that alone. So we're actually going to up our goal.”

To what? We asked.

“When I did the last market sizing, we already have potential for about $49 billion and so I would shoot for an even 50 if we could,” Garcha said. “And I think we could do more.”

Europe fights back, kind of

Last month, we brought you an exclusive look at how the European Commission is suggesting that European Union states respond to questions about the Trump administration’s dismantling of U.S. foreign aid. TLDR: “The EU cannot fill the gap left by others.”

But that doesn’t mean Brussels — the Western world’s third-largest aid donor, after the U.S. and Germany — hasn’t been thinking about it. In the weeks after the Trump administration announced its initial freeze on U.S. foreign aid, the head of the commission’s development department wrote a draft internal memo, seen by Devex, arguing that health, migration, and fragility were the three affected areas most vital to EU interests.

Department chief Koen Doens wrote that the EU should work with the rest of the “global community” on how to prevent disease outbreaks, long-term pandemic preparedness, and programs addressing infectious diseases — in that order.

Take the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which will struggle this year to hit its $18 billion replenishment target. “To be seen how much the US stays invested [in the Global Fund],” Doens wrote in the draft memo, dated mid-February. “Here again, an opportunity and necessity for the EU to cover up.”

The internal EU document on the “lines-to-take” publicly about USAID’s collapse has also been updated, with a new section on what to say to “US interlocutors” (presuming there are any).

One argument goes: “The gap left by the US will benefit competitors and rivals (e.g., China and Russia), which will use the opportunity to further occupy the space in developing countries and in multilateral organisations.”

And speaking of multilateral organizations, the EU has toned down its language that first argued that “this is the moment to accelerate reform and modernisation of the multilateral development aid system and put in place structural reforms in UN agencies.”

Instead, the EU now “welcomes the opportunity to work together in a changing environment with all its partners including the US, as well as with the UN and its agencies in driving forward the internal reform process — the UN80 initiative — to ensure that the UN remains effective, cost-efficient and responsive.”

Exclusive: How Europe is planning for life after USAID (Pro)

What we’re reading

As traditional aid shrinks, non-ODA financial flows are increasingly crucial, but their transparency lags far behind. [Publish What You Fund] 

China has nominated former vice finance minister Zou Jiayi as candidate to lead the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. [Nikkei Asia]

Replete with errors, a leaked U.S. State Department dataset is nearly useless for analyzing funding cuts. [Devex]

The U.S. is closing in on a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo that would see American companies control more minerals in return for U.S. support for the government. [Financial Times]