Presented by Saudi Commission for Health Specialties
Philanthropic giving is in the spotlight because the picture for traditional foreign aid has darkened significantly. Meanwhile, a perhaps surprising group of givers has emerged: pharmaceutical giants.
Also in today’s edition: New Year’s Day in Ethiopia — and a new dawn for African climate finance?
+ Happening today at 11 a.m. ET: We’ll be speaking with Jordana Barrack, executive director of the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation, on the lessons from the foundation’s shift toward a trust-based approach shaped by direct feedback from its grantees. Register here. If you can’t attend live, we’ll send you a recording.
Big (pharma) dose of generosity
The world’s largest corporations have steadily ratcheted up their giving in recent years, and pharmaceutical companies — Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly and Company, AstraZeneca, and Amgen Inc. — account for the top four largest corporate givers.
That’s according to a new report by The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit that advises philanthropic organizations. The report notes that donating medicines and vaccines is one of the major ways pharmaceutical companies give. For example, most of AstraZeneca’s 2023 giving was via medicine donations to patient-access programs in low- and middle-income countries, Gwendolyn Lim, partner and head of Bridgespan’s Southeast Asia office, tells my colleague Jenny Lei Ravelo.
“We see these healthcare companies embracing an approach of giving that complements their core businesses, identifying and developing products and services to address unmet needs,” she says.
What about corporate giving as a whole? Between 2019 and 2023, the top 20 corporate givers grew their giving by an average of 87%, partly due to increases in their companies’ overall value.
Jenny details several factors at play:
• Some causes have a lower risk.
• Governments mandate giving or corporate social responsibility reporting.
• About 85% of the top global corporate givers give to communities or regions where they are located.
• Corporations try to align with national priorities.
• Collaborative philanthropy is easier said than done.
Though corporate philanthropy won’t be able to plug the gaps left by bilateral donor cuts, the numbers are encouraging.
“We do see … significant opportunity for corporate givers to step up and meet urgent needs through thoughtful application of their core capabilities, investing in communities near company operations to address local needs and integrating giving into their purpose to create tangible change,” Lim says.
Read: Corporate philanthropy surges, led by pharma giants
+ ICYMI, download your copy of our special report on the top 10 foundations funding development in 2025.
Giving Gates advice
When it comes to giving, the Gates Foundation inevitably springs to mind. The foundation further elevated its profile last spring when Bill Gates announced he was giving away more than $200 billion over the next two decades, with the aim of sunsetting the foundation by 2045.
That $200 billion investment needs to last long after Gates leaves the scene, write Abigail Neel and Sara Bennett, both from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
In an opinion piece for Devex, they point out that development programs started in the 1950s and 1960s were never intended to continue forever, but “the phasing out of development assistance programs has been undermined by the fact that they are rarely designed with long-term sustainability in mind, and may be captured by parties who have vested interests in sustaining the status quo.”
So what does Gates need to do to ensure a sustainable legacy? Neel and Bennett argue that among other strategies, the foundation needs to foster local ownership. “The Gates Foundation, however, has often operated at arm’s length with national governments,” they write, pointing out that just 17% of its staff is based outside the United States, and many of these are in its London and Berlin offices.
“The African proverb adorning the foundation’s Seattle headquarters, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,’ is relevant here,” they add. “Impatient optimists at the foundation have tended toward going fast (with a few faithful friends), but to sustain the impact of its programs beyond 2045, the foundation will need to transform the way it works with local partners, and government in particular.”
Opinion: The Gates Foundation’s last 20 years — planning for sustainability matters
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End on a good note
The second Africa Climate Summit in Ethiopia closed with a sense that the continent’s global leadership on climate is crystallizing, my colleague Ayenat Mersie, who was on the ground, tells me.
“We have African leadership not only for the African continent but also for the rest of the world,” said U.K. climate envoy Rachel Kyte. Echoing that sentiment, Mukhtar Babayev, president of the 29th U.N. Climate Change Conference, said: “Today we need to consider different leaders in different regions. In the African continent, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania are emerging … and we need to think about how to bring more and more leader countries in the process.”
A draft Addis Ababa Declaration backs that posture with specifics. It calls for accelerated reform of multilateral development banks to increase concessional finance and lower borrowing costs, urges broader reform of the international financial architecture, and stresses that adaptation finance “must avoid debt-creating instruments.”
On new vehicles, the draft “welcomes” the Africa Climate Innovation Compact and the African Climate Facility — an initiative of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali — with the goal of mobilizing $50 billion a year in catalytic capital to scale African climate solutions. Details remain thin, but that follows Monday’s announcement of $100 billion from financial institutions to support green industrialization.
The draft also proposes shifting the cadence of the summit to every three years, rotating across subregions of the African Union.
Ali Mohamed, Kenya’s special envoy for climate, celebrated the talks. “We leave this summit not only with agreements signed, but with conviction that Africa is charting its own path, writing its own story, and leading with the solutions the world desperately needs,” he said.
And for host country Ethiopia — where the summit’s close coincided with its New Year’s Eve — there was extra reason to celebrate, having pulled off a gathering positioning Addis at the center of climate diplomacy.
Sunny forecast
Climate finance from multilateral development banks rose 10% in 2024 to a record $137 billion, with $85 billion directed to low- and middle-income economies, according to a joint report from the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Private finance mobilized by MDBs also surged, climbing 33% to $134 billion.
The figures, released Tuesday, come ahead of the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Belém, Brazil, where expanding climate finance will be a central theme. MDBs say climate finance has more than doubled in low- and middle-income countries over the past five years, with nearly 70% going to mitigation and 31% to adaptation.
The other shoe
Official development assistance, or ODA, hasn’t been as lucky as MDB climate finance. Even before this year’s drastic aid cuts, ODA fell by 9% in 2024 for the first time in nearly a decade of sustained growth, my colleague Miguel Antonio Tamonan writes.
For this year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that total ODA from the Development Assistance Committee will likely decline by 9% to 17%, or up to $35 billion in monetary terms. It’s likely to continue falling the year after that as well. Then in 2027, ODA is expected to be at the same level as in 2020.
But how exactly does this trickle down donor by donor? We have a breakdown of who exactly is spending less on aid, and who is spending more.
Read: How much will donors spend on aid in the coming years? (Pro)
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Farm follows function
The Africa Climate Summit wasn’t the only big recent gathering on the continent. The 2025 Africa Food Systems Forum, held in Dakar, Senegal, last week, ended with promising indications that the continent is trying to stimulate its own agricultural production with locally sourced financing, writes Devex contributor David Njagi.
And unlike in past annual forums, this year saw participation from agroecology advocates — who have typically avoided the event because of their opposition to industrial methods of farming. To many observers, that sent a signal that Africa is recognizing that it cannot focus on increasing yields at the expense of destroying the environment — and that business and climate goals must go hand in hand.
“It is a sign of progress that we are saying we cannot remain divided for so long,” says Susan Chomba, director of Vital Landscapes at the World Resources Institute. “We want to come together, we want to listen to each other, we want to have evidence informing what is happening, and above all, we want to put the smallholder farmer in Africa first. I think if we continue like that, there is a bright future for food systems in Africa.”
Read: 5 takeaways from the 2025 Africa Food Systems Forum
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In other news
Two suspected drone attacks on Tuesday struck a Gaza-bound flotilla carrying humanitarian aid along with Greta Thunberg and other pro-Palestinian activists attempting to break Israel's blockade. [BBC]
A new study shows how individual fossil fuel companies are making previously impossible heat waves happen and could have to pay compensation. [The Guardian]
Governments in sub-Saharan Africa have provided school meals to roughly 20 million more children over the past two years, according to the World Food Programme, showing a move away from dependence on foreign aid and a stronger commitment to education. [Reuters]
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About the author
Anna Gawel
Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.
