The Gates Foundation remains the largest funder in development, and in what will be our final Money Matters newsletter of 2025, we’ve crunched the numbers to see where it has spent its money. We’re also looking back at a collapse in humanitarian funding and what that might mean.
Devex will be taking a break over the holidays, and the next edition of this newsletter will appear on Jan. 5.
Also in today’s edition: Inside the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation’s AI-focused giving, and how the Soros Economic Development Fund is using private capital to fill gaps left by shrinking public dollars.
How is one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations approaching global development at a time of shifting aid priorities? Join us on Jan. 5 for a Devex Pro Funding Briefing with Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Rikke Johannessen to unpack how the foundation structures and deploys its global development and humanitarian funding. Register now.
No Gates-keeping
Today, we’re delving into where the Gates Foundation spends its money. We’ve taken a deep dive into the geographies and sectors where the foundation provides the most funding.
This is a companion piece that adds detail to several previous articles. We’ve looked in the past at which organizations received money from the Gates Foundation, and we’ve also checked into which geographies philanthropies spend their money in.
We found that regionally, the Gates Foundation gave the most to Africa, and that within the continent, Nigeria was the country that received the most.
Read: Where did the Gates Foundation spend its money? (Pro)
+ Begin your 15-day free trial of Devex Pro and instantly access our comprehensive suite of resources: expert analysis, insider briefings, a funding database, curated event listings, and a library of exclusive content designed to keep you ahead.
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 Asian Development Bank has approved a $10 million loan to strengthen access to green finance for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises in Tajikistan.
The European Investment Bank has launched a €23.3 million ($27.4 million) credit line and grant to support green and social impact financing in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The European Union has released an additional €350,000 ($410,000) in funding to strengthen its emergency response in central and northwestern Mali.
The United Nations Office at Nairobi requires the services of an institution to develop an agro-environmental observatory for climate adaptation in Cuba.
The World Bank has approved a €33 million ($38.8 million) loan to strengthen the fisheries and agrifood sector in Montenegro.
+ Try out Devex Pro Funding today with a free five-day trial, and explore funding opportunities from over 850 sources in addition to our analysis and news content.
Another terrible year
It’s been a terrible decade for the international humanitarian system, with levels of conflict at the highest point since World War II, and (depending on how you count) more people in need than ever before. Last year, it looked as if things might be getting slightly better, as the reverberating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic began to ease. But then most major donors made massive cuts to aid, and now things are arguably worse than ever. In particular, funding from the United States — which has historically funded around 45% of all aid — dropped from $11 billion to $2.5 billion.
Funding dropped from $37 billion to $20.5 billion last year, without a concomitant drop in the number of people in need. Just five conflicts — Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen — have left more than 100 million people in need of aid.
Read: How humanitarian funding collapsed in 2025
Less sci-fi, more systems
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation leveled up this year, with $75 million channeled to AI-focused grants throughout 2025.
That cash was allocated through 149 grants in 13 countries, backing organizations such as Digital Green, which is using artificial intelligence to scale agricultural advice for smallholder farmers; and Direct Relief, which is applying machine learning to improve humanitarian medical forecasting. Over the last 10 years, the Boston-based foundation has contributed $500 million to such programs, the organization stated, making it one of the largest contributors to “public-purpose AI” across the world.
“The focus is less on technological novelty than on ensuring communities and public institutions can work together to build AI solutions that meet real needs,” writes my colleague Catherine Cheney, who spoke with Vilas Dhar, the foundation’s head, last week.
An example of that came from the same place Dhar had just returned from: Trinidad and Tobago. The foundation had helped launch the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center on the island nation, creating a research, policy, and governance hub housed at the University of the West Indies.
Rather than prioritizing technical breakthroughs, Dhar explained, the foundation is betting on institutions like this to build the governance, data systems, and delivery capacity needed to translate AI tools into real-world impact.
“We need a new set, a layer of institutions, that are able to take the incredible innovation happening in these companies and turn them into real outcomes,” Dhar said.
Read: McGovern Foundation’s AI grants prioritize institutions over breakthroughs
Reality check
Despite all the good news from philanthropy, Lily Han — the head of policy and innovative finance at the Soros Economic Development Fund — had a different message: Private capital cannot fill the hole left by public dollars.
“Given all of this, it just means the urgency is greater than ever to stretch all of our dollars further,” Han says. “This means using our capital in a very strategic and targeted way that can try to unlock the greatest amounts of private commercial capital, domestic government resources, or make the shrinking amount of public sector development or climate finance dollars go much further.”
In large part, that’s what the Soros Economic Development Fund aims to do. As the impact investment arm of the Open Society Foundations, the SEDF has committed over $550 million in debt, equity, and guarantees to groups that align with the mission of the OSF — from the Kiva Refugee Investment Fund, which provides microfinance to displaced entrepreneurs, to Hewatele, a Kenyan company focused on medical oxygen.
While the SEDF has three core investment pillars — climate, independent media, and reproductive health and rights — Han tells my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz the fund will be expanding in 2026, placing more emphasis on critical minerals in Africa, technology, and AI.
Read the Q&A: Critical minerals, AI, and nature — where the Soros fund is investing next (Pro)
A turning point?
The African Development Fund, the concessional lending arm of the African Development Bank, has raised $11 billion for its 17th replenishment cycle.
It’s a record figure for the fund, which provides grants and low-interest loans to some of Africa’s lowest-income nations — and a notable increase from its last replenishment, which raised $8.9 billion in December of 2022. In the years ahead, the fund will channel that money toward energy access, food security, human capital, and infrastructure across the continent, targeting 37 low-income and fragile nations in particular.
“This is not just a replenishment,” Sidi Ould Tah, the president of the AfDB, said in a statement. “It is a turning point.”
The replenishment also introduces a governance shift allowing capital market borrowing, my colleague Ayenat Mersie tells me, potentially unlocking $5 billion per cycle. It’s a shift that will make the fund’s approach similar to that of the World Bank’s lending arm, the International Development Association — commonly referred to as IDA. For Tah, such a shift will “define the next generation of the fund, enabling greater leverage, stronger financial sustainability, and a step–change in impact driven by financial innovation.”
Read: African Development Bank’s concessional lending arm raises record $11B
About the author
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
