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Humanitarian nonprofit Mercy Corps is rebranding as Prosper Global, while also dealing with losing about two-thirds of its government funding following the dismantling of USAID.
Also in today’s edition: The Government Accountability Office says the State Department won’t answer questions. Boy, we know how that feels.
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Humanitarian nonprofit Mercy Corps is rebranding as Prosper Global at the same time as it navigates one of the biggest funding shocks in its history. The organization lost roughly the majority of its government funding in the 2025 dismantling of USAID under President Donald Trump, and has cut about 40% of staff in the past year.
Leaders say the rebrand has been years in the making, but it also reflects a push to communicate a clearer vision — one focused on locally led development, investment, and long-term opportunity. The organization will continue operating under the Mercy Corps name for six months before officially transitioning in September, writes Devex contributing reporter Sophie Edwards.
“Our fundamental belief is that everyone, no matter what situation they’re in — in the midst of a crisis, in happy situations — really deserves the right to thrive and prosper and to create their own future,” Tjada D'Oyen McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, told Devex in a video interview.
“We want to be much clearer and much bolder about what we’re hoping to achieve. … We don’t want to just help people survive like we help people survive and then try to go on to live their best lives,” McKenna added.
The shift also reflects a broader rethink about the language of aid. “We believe that the communities we work with are leaders. They are not recipients,” said Mary Stata, the organization’s chief development officer.
Read: Mercy Corps to become Prosper Global
Nearly eight months after asking the U.S. Department of State how it plans to manage foreign aid after the dismantling of USAID, the Government Accountability Office says it’s still waiting for answers.
“This is information that’s critical to understanding whether they are capable or positioning themselves to effectively oversee all of this new foreign assistance,” GAO Director Latesha Love-Grayer told lawmakers this week. “We’re unable to provide that information to Congress and taxpayers in a timely way when we’re waiting up to eight months for basic answers to questions.”
The standoff raises fresh concerns about who is actually overseeing billions in aid now that most USAID staff have been fired, writes Devex Senior Reporter Michael Igoe — especially as the State Department plans to send more funding directly to foreign governments, where oversight can be murkier. As Love-Grayer put it, “The visibility into how the funds have been spent can be a little less transparent.”
Read: Watchdog — US State Department not answering aid oversight questions
Related: Inside the USAID closeout mess (Pro)
The State Department has quietly removed previously published global health memorandums of understanding from its website, according to nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen.
“It looks like the State Department inadvertently did the right thing, by sharing key documents, and then immediately reverted to secrecy and took the documents down once they were noticed,” wrote Peter Maybarduk, director of access to medicines program at Public Citizen, in a statement.
The State Department did not respond to an inquiry from Devex about why the documents were removed. The apparent sleight of hand comes shortly after The New York Times reported on an internal memo about linking lifesaving aid to Zambia to critical minerals concessions.
As AI spreads fast, a new set of partnerships is taking shape between frontier AI labs and organizations working directly with communities — and they could decide whether the technology actually works where development challenges are greatest, writes Devex Senior Editor Catherine Cheney.
On the Devex podcast Global Progress in the AI Era, Alex Nawar of OpenAI, Manu Chopra of Karya, and Han Sheng Chia of the Center for Global Development discussed how collaborations between AI companies and social enterprises are shaping the next phase of AI adoption.
Chopra says the upside is huge — AI could boost productivity for farmers, teachers, health workers, and entrepreneurs. But he worries the gains won’t reach the people who need them most. “I worry deeply about lopsided economic productivity,” he says. “For me, the biggest worry is we get the eureka AI moment. It creates incredible productivity gains. But they just never reach the communities that they should reach.”
Karya’s model aims to avoid that by bringing rural communities directly into the AI value chain — helping contribute data and refine models so they actually work locally.
For Nawar, that kind of ground-level insight is exactly what AI developers need. “Who are the organizations operating in the global south that have a commitment to evidence, that have relationships with government, that have an understanding of how to scale?” he says.
Through initiatives such as the AI for Global Development Accelerator — a collaboration involving OpenAI, CGD, and the Agency Fund — social enterprises are now getting funding, technical support, and access to AI tools to test real-world applications.
But as Chia put it, the core question isn’t whether AI will do good or harm. “The debate is no longer about whether AI can deliver benefits or harms,” he says. “They can clearly do both. The question is which version will reach greater scale.”
Read: What happens when AI labs and social enterprises build together?
A key donor seat on the body overseeing Sustainable Development Goal 4, the U.N.’s global education goal, has been vacant for three months after the United Kingdom’s term ended in December.
Advocates say the vacancy comes at a worrying moment. Education aid is expected to fall sharply this year, with UNICEF warning cuts could push 6 million more children out of school and official development assistance for education projected to drop by $3.2 billion — a 24% fall from 2023 levels.
“Cuts to development and humanitarian assistance have already had a disproportionate impact on education. At the same time, needs are growing, especially in humanitarian crises,” David Edwards, general secretary of Education International, tells Sophie.
“At a time when donors should be working together to agree on how they can reverse the devastating cuts to education and work out how they can support the achievement of SDG 4, they appear to be missing in action,” he adds.
Read: Donor seat on education SDG committee vacant amid funding crisis (Pro)
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The Trump administration has put critical minerals front and center — and development advocates are making the case that aid can help win that race, Devex Senior Reporter Adva Saldinger tells me.
At a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition dinner on Tuesday, bipartisan lawmakers, private sector leaders, and development officials argued that smart development spending can help secure supply chains. The president and CEO of USGLC, Liz Schrayer, said the goal was to highlight how “smart, low-cost, wrap-around investments help America win in this race.”
“Companies often said to me that if we want to win in the world, we have to do the same thing as any good developer does,” she said. “We have to use low-cost wraparound investments that provide stability, strengthen rule of law, fight corruption, support an educated and healthy workforce. So when we’re talking about doing the same kind of investments, which we need to do, we also have to invest in these development tools.”
Development agencies are already pivoting. At the Millennium Challenge Corporation, acting chief of staff Dan Petrie said the agency is reshaping parts of its Zambia compact to support reforms tied to the country’s minerals sector and infrastructure linked to the Lobito corridor.
“Individual transactions are important. We want more of them, of course, but to really win this race, we need to be working systematically and building a solid foundation, which is exactly our vision,” Petrie said.
Related: Does the development world need to worry about critical minerals? (Pro)
Argentina has formally withdrawn from the World Health Organization, following the U.S., in a politically driven exit over similar criticisms of the health agency’s operations. [Al Jazeera]
The World Bank has reversed a three-decade stance, conceding that industrial policy works and published new guidance on how governments can deploy it more effectively. [The Wall Street Journal]
African Billionaire Aliko Dangote partnered with China's GCL Group in a $4.2 billion deal to fuel what will be East Africa’s largest fertilizer complex, aiming to transform the continent’s agricultural self-sufficiency. [Business Insider Africa]
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