Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott — the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — gave away $7.2 billion in 2025. That’s four times her philanthropy just one year earlier, placing Scott at almost the same level as the Gates Foundation, which spent $8 billion in 2024.
So, where did Scott’s money go? We take a closer look.
Also in today’s edition: The lack of clarity over U.S. supply chain contracts, and how budget infighting could bring the U.N. to a standstill.
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Grant Scott!
MacKenzie Scott called her philanthropy this past year “a vanishingly tiny fraction” of giving. In a recent blog post, she noted that people gave $471 billion to American charities alone in 2020 — and how across the world, $68 billion was channeled to family members in different countries.
But despite her own characterization, Scott’s contributions this year were far from thin. Six years into her philanthropy, Scott has now given away more than $26 billion to 2,500 organizations, more than many legacy donors have managed in their lifetime.
In a Devex analysis of Scott’s 2025 giving, our data reporter Miguel Antonio Tamonan finds both scale and shift: a twelvefold increase in funding for organizations working in low- and middle-income countries, and a growing reliance on funds and regrantors to stretch her dollars further. While U.S.-based educational institutions still captured the largest share; climate, conservation, and global south–focused groups saw Scott’s biggest international allocation to date.
Whether she embraces the label or not, Scott’s approach is reshaping the philanthropic landscape — and cementing her role as one of its most influential players.
Read: How MacKenzie Scott quadrupled her philanthropic giving in 2025 (Pro)
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Funding activity
We publish tenders, grants, and other funding announcements on our Funding Platform. Here are some of those viewed the most in the past 10 days.
The United Nations has invited qualified firms to submit bids for the rehabilitation of health facilities in Madagascar.
German foreign ministry BMZ has launched a call for proposals to provide green urban mobility solutions in India, with a focus on women.
The European Union has provided a €180,000 ($195,000) grant to support advocacy on migration issues in Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland.
The World Bank has approved a €100 million ($108 million) loan to strengthen disaster response in Croatia.
The Central American Bank for Economic Integration has announced $14.28 million to strengthen lending capacity for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, or MSMEs, in Guatemala.
The Asian Development Bank has announced a $15.2 million funding to advance sustainable transport in Georgia.
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What next for NextGen?
The NextGen global health supply chain contracts were a behemoth. They were slated to be the world’s largest-ever aid project, with a total budget of almost $17 billion across nine different contracts, serving dozens of countries, over the course of a decade. Even commissioning it proved to be a multiyear marathon, spanning not just the whole of the Biden administration, but most of the first Trump administration as well.
Now, all of that work has proved in vain, and the project has been canceled.
But the question is, what takes its place? The contracts were due to supply a huge number of health commodities, including HIV and malaria medications. Who will now deliver them?
There are a couple of potential answers. The U.S. could keep working with Chemonics, which is delivering the current global health supply chain contract, or tap a group such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, which has plenty of expertise in this area.
But nobody seems to know what will happen. That might be because the U.S. government is playing its cards close to its chest, but some experts prefer a different explanation.
“I worry that we don’t know the answer because they don’t know the answer,” one such source tells Devex.
Read: What will replace USAID’s largest project? No one seems to know (Pro)
What will the UN cut?
The United Nations has suddenly found itself with a massive budget black hole after the withdrawal of huge amounts of U.S. funding. But what will be cut, exactly? No one can agree. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has put forward a reform initiative, known as UN80, which proposes a 15% budget cut and an 18% reduction in the number of posts, but for many, this has just been a jumping-off point to begin negotiations.
My colleague Colum Lynch has taken a look at the infighting which has held up any progress on reform.
Exclusive: Inside the UN's budget showdown (Pro)
New Millennium
It’s been a tumultuous year for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, just as it has been for every U.S. development agency. At the end of last year, my colleague Adva Saldinger called on insider experts to assess where it stands today.
For a while, the agency was in the crosshairs, said James Mazzarella, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center. But widespread support, including from partners and from within the U.S. Congress, kept it alive.
A significant number of programs were cut — a move Mazzarella called “jarring,” since MCC had never previously canceled a compact while a partner country was meeting its obligations. But with new countries becoming eligible — including Fiji and Tonga, selected at an August board meeting — the agency ended the year with nearly as many programs as it started with.
Read: Weathering the storm — Millennium Challenge Corporation pivot underway (Pro)
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About the author
David Ainsworth@daveainsworth4
David Ainsworth is business editor at Devex, where he writes about finance and funding issues for development institutions. He was previously a senior writer and editor for magazines specializing in nonprofits in the U.K. and worked as a policy and communications specialist in the nonprofit sector for a number of years. His team specializes in understanding reports and data and what it teaches us about how development functions.
