B (3:11)

I think it's very safe to say the development sector has gone through some major changes. It's great to hear from a philanthropic standpoint at least, Founders Pledge, those are really impressive figures. And it's a very positive trajectory with a number of the sort of largest donors. The U.S. european countries have signaled these plans in many cases to scale back their investments in aid, at least aid supporting development and humanitarian response. I know that amid all of those big changes earlier this year, Founders Pledge was involved in an effort to respond to sort of urgent needs fueled in part by those disruptions. Can you tell us more about how those changes landed with you and how Founders Pledge responded?

A (3:49)

Yeah, absolutely. I happened to actually be in Tanzania just after the US Step work order came through. And I remember I was walking through a market, I think it was a couple of weeks after. And for me this still felt like more of a headline than reality. A woman came up to me, just a stranger guessing I was American. And she just came up and asked how she was going to get her antiretrovirals for her hiv. And this had obviously never happened to me in the past. I lived in East Africa for five years and nothing like this had ever happened. This is a major shift that we had not seen before, at least in my career in the space. And that funding uncertainty became much more real. This wasn't just a line on a budget. It's really life or death for many vulnerable populations. So I felt really grateful to be in an ecosystem that includes, of course, the center for Global Development, that was excited and eager to take action and see this disruption as both opportunities to move forward. And so at Founder's Pledge, we moved forward in two specific ways. The first was very immediate. We started this Rapid Response Fund, which was targeting the more immediate urgent effort to save programs that were the most critical to save and improve lives that were now at risk. And the second was this re strategizing around our funds and specifically the Catalytic Impact Fund, to answer the longer term question of how do we build for a resilient and durable world that is less prone to these precarious situations where lives are left quite suddenly at risk. So I'm sure we'll speak more about that. But the Rapid Response Fund, as you asked. Yeah. Was our immediate effort in collaboration with A couple of organizations and we ended up mobilizing over 13 million in just six months, which was deeply motivating for me as an individual to see just how much people care about these lives. It ended up projecting to save more than 4,000 children's lives alone and more than that in total lives. I don't know if anyone else listening felt some hopelessness in what we can do going forward, but I certainly did and felt really motivated to see how the ecosystem of actors working in low and middle income countries really came together to generally collaborate, but to deeply listen as well to what was happening in these contexts. We were specifically working with the life you can save and project resource optimization which I believe you've spoken with on the podcast as well. Pro and both were excellent partners to identify what programs are a the most critical, the most cost effective and which are are truly at risk because the situation is still continually evolving. And so PRO was doing an excellent job of reaching out to the programs to get the context week to week to understand what was happening and where support was most needed. So the collaboration allowed us to mobilize resources and also communicate real up to date situations to donors. And that was the second thing that really motivated me, seeing how people responded with such deep care to the lives that were at risk in the sudden gap. So a unique situation where you could save a life for less than $1,000, which is wild when you think about it. One of the grants went to Helen Keller International for malnutrition treatment in Nigeria and donors really stepped up. We did not expect this level of response and it was deeply inspirational to me to see that. And so now we're taking that forward into this catalytic impact fund. We made a total of 13 grants from that Rapid Response Fund to 11 partners. The last of these grants was actually a sort of a bridge grant. And I think it nicely illustrates both the importance of the immediate response with the longer term building of durable systems and an improved future. And that was to Clinton Health Access Initiative or CHAI Technical support units which were particularly focused on empowering and supporting 10 Sub Saharan African governments as they made changes to their budgets in response to the cuts in their Ministry of Health where more than 10% of their budgets were cut as a result of the frozen funds. And if you can imagine, every dollar from those Ministry of Health has potential to save lives. And so to cut 10% is quite a frightening concept. And so Chai has been supporting them to analyze where their budget was previously allocated and find efficiencies where they can integrate services that were previously through aid and to look for ways that they can reprioritize the budgets to the most cost effective and life saving interventions. So this is the kind of thing that we're looking for now to start moving from that immediate rapid response fund urgent gap filling into this longer term building for the future to prevent this kind of thing from being as risky long term.

B (9:08)

I think that that sort of uncertainty that you mentioned really was something that all of us were captivated by and trying to think about how we can prevent this circumstance from happening again. And as you noted, I think it sounds like it was a really great partnership on all sides that you were able to build amid this challenging time. And we at CGD were incredibly lucky and felt really pleased about the opportunity to host Project Resource Optimization Pro that you mentioned. And for listeners who maybe haven't checked it out already, we did post a podcast back at the beginning of June where I spoke with two members of that team, Caitlin Tullock and Rob Rosenbaum, about their work and the effort that went into that and how they were able to guide some other donors into the space of identifying these urgent and vetted projects. Really looking at how do you identify the most cost effective interventions and plug the holes where possible, though still a small slice of the pie in terms of what was happening prior. So I want to pivot a little clearly. You have been thinking a lot about how this sort of private giving can complement or even reshape traditional development finance. With the Catalytic Impact Fund, it sounds like it's designed to sort of do just that and help philanthropic capital move easier and faster into spaces that might otherwise be overlooked. So how did you think about the objectives and priorities of the fund when you were starting out?

A (10:24)

We have this prevention treatment analogy. This principle guiding the Catalytic Impact Fund is to really focus on that prevention aspect, trying to target the high leverage timely opportunities where a modest grant can trigger systemic improvements or remove key bottlenecks in the long term. So in other words, we're trying to do more than provide temporary relief. We're investing in a portfolio with the goal of transforming the future of global health and development.

B (10:55)

I love the immune system analogy, particularly given how much you're working in global health. That feels really apt. And it sounds like the sort of current aid and policy environment helped inform your approach. But you're also careful to recognize that you can't chase headlines, but that things you can do to really advance progress and maybe address some of these like precarity issues that came up would be things that are really of high value and worth thinking about. Has the emphasis of the new fund changed the way you identify investments? Have you employed like a more proactive approach to scouting opportunities? And maybe you can also share, if there is a standard time frame or amount invested, any regional preferences when it comes to recipients?

A (11:38)

We are increasingly proactive in our research and our grant making with this question in mind of how do we build an improved future? We need to identify what are the most powerful levers to allow for that. Where there is the greatest risk or opportunity, particularly where there hasn't been focus already. And we're very lucky to have the full flexibility to consider anything. So we are not limited by sectors, by geography, by time frame, by type of delivery of the intervention, which is extremely rare. Even as a funder, it's also very challenging, I'll be honest. We are asking research questions like what will help the billions of people who now depend on smallholder farming not only to survive year to year, but instead to graduate longer term into higher welfare brackets? Or what pathways will support low income governments towards really achieving financial resilience? Or what are the causes of mortality that will increase in the future that are trending upwards rather than down, and how can we prevent that now? So these are the kinds of questions we're asking, informed of course by peer reviewed research, but also by experts and implementers that are in the relevant contexts. And based on those investigations that we're doing, we then proactively reach out to programs that are well equipped to drive forward the most promising levers in the context and hoping that these, that we can identify these for driving that long term change. And what this means is that we don't have a regional focus because we are really, like I said, open to anything that can maximize the most good per dollar invested. So we're starting with this position of impartiality. We do believe that every person's life and well being has equal moral value, regardless of where they were born. And although we don't have a preference for specific contexts, in reality we find that most of our grants end up going to programs that primarily focus on low and middle income countries, or potentially exclusively, because there's the reality of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that a dollar creates infinitely more well being for someone who is already living in extreme poverty than for someone who is living in a, in a wealthy nation and comparatively has access to more services and income. So in lower income contexts, of course, a few dollars can restore a person's sight or protect a child from a fatal Case of malaria, you know, when they're under five or enable them to learn to read. Whereas in a high income country it would be very challenging for a few dollars to achieve those kinds of outcomes. Instead it might buy a cup of coffee, maybe for a few dollars. So we do tend towards supporting lower income contexts in terms of kind of our grant amounts. We have historically averaged around 100 to 300,000 per grant, although as our funds are growing, fortunately we are hoping to extend that into more the $1 to $3 million grant range. And we don't have a standard timeframe that we're looking at. We're really flexible to kind of what we call expected value. So looking at how long in the future would we see benefits and modeling out basically the uncertainty and the projected outcomes discounted based on that uncertainty for future value.

B (15:16)

You mentioned operating in some more neglected spaces. And I think sometimes they're neglected because of information asymmetry, sometimes they're just hard, which you sort of mentioned. Also potentially high risk. So I wonder if you could say something about your risk appetite or interest in investments that may be at least highly uncertain.

A (15:37)

Yeah, that's such a great question. We are risk neutral, meaning we are willing to fund both high risk, high reward bets as well as the more certain opportunities. We basically we compare these on equal terms. And I want to zoom out to just say that I'm really excited to see that this is even a question people are interested in talking about. I'm noticing an increasing focus on, on cost effectiveness, assessing where does a dollar go the furthest and how do we measure that from both implementers, researchers, funders. I'm also noticing that this can be a drawback at times, particularly in the effective giving ecosystem. Many of the highest potential opportunities for impact may be neglected, like you said, because they are uncertain. The impact of the program may be uncertain or potentially hard to measure. And I notice that the focus that many of us have on trying to hit the highest return for dollar invested sometimes biases towards things that are the most certain or evidence backed, where we have quite a lot of randomized control trials, for example, on a particular intervention. And so the projected value is quite certain. And I think the challenge here is this can leave things that are challenging to measure, like we said, that are maybe challenging to randomize or to have a control group as things that are just not considered. And so what we're looking at here is taking the best available evidence or cases and building models or simulations of the likely outcomes from that. So this allows us to look at Things like policy change or advocacy, which when successful, could be truly transformational at a macro level. And because we are risk neutral, we can look at those forecasts and compare something that might have more certain evidence versus something that we're using our best available logic and case studies as well as available evidence, and compare those against each other. And we can then invest in what has the highest expected value. Of course, this means we need to take discounts for uncertainty where there is that challenge. But it makes me excited that we are still able to value cost effectiveness, but with more flexibility to assessing the possibilities of things that are challenging to measure and not deciding that we will not consider those because of the challenge.

B (18:14)

I think it's important obviously to have that sort of slightly broader aperture. I do find that a lot of the people, particularly when we talk about international assistance and things, the advocates of, okay, let's pursue the interventions we know really work, tend to acknowledge that it's also important to leave room for that innovation and that we sort of have to bring some humility to the exercise because we don't know everything that works all of the time. And so having the willingness to try new things, explore new territory is a really important thing, as long as you pair sort of evaluation or your tracking so you know what works in the end. You've been talking about this with some enthusiasm, so clearly you're excited about this in general as an endeavor. But I wonder what makes you most excited about this new fund and new approach that you get to pursue?

A (18:58)

I'm glad you can tell I am very excited about this. I think what makes me particularly excited is that there has been a disruption in the funding ecosystem with the shift in aid, not just in the U.S. but as you said, in European countries as well. And I love the idea of seeing a challenge as an opportunity. And I think that that is what I am seeing here with this fund. I think that this is a really exciting time to rethink how and what philanthropy can do and to start thinking about how solutions can provide that long term change and address root challenges. And I think I've seen a lot of efforts in my career to make cost effective change, but I often see that these changes are also stepwise, relatively small changes and short. And so I'm very excited to get the opportunity to ask ourselves the question of what would be truly game changing. In fact, our team has been using that as one of our main filters. As we're looking across the many opportunities that could be very cost effective. We're asking ourselves like, okay, which of these would truly change the future? Which of these are game changy? We sometimes say, I find that just deeply motivational to have the opportunity to even ask that and then to see ideas come to the surface where I do think there is that hope.

B (20:26)

All right, so you put game change on the table. How do you think then about what it would mean to be successful in this work? What is going to change the game and how would you know that you've succeeded? Whether in the next five years or even over a longer time horizon, the.

A (20:41)

Way we think about our success or our impact is our counterfactual impact. What would happen if we did not make this grant? And how does that differ from our projections? And then the reality of making that grant, that's informing how we decide on what we are investing in. It's also informing how we measure our success. We see a few key levers where we expect this impact to be coming from to get a little bit more tangible in what catalytic can mean. So the first is on improving systems. The second is on accelerating progress, particularly removing key bottlenecks. And the third is supporting and enabling new proofs of concept to develop the iteration and foundation they need to be able to then move towards the next best thing that can be scaled up. So maybe I'll share a few examples in there of what we're looking for in measuring success. The first that I mentioned was improving or transforming systems. Here basically we're asking ourselves the questions of did this investment truly improve or transform a system to effectively then improve lives in the long term? So we're not asking just how many lives can this initial pilot save? We're asking can this grant permanently strengthen institutions and policies to save lives for decades? And we're hoping, yes. One of our recent grants, as I mentioned, was to the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which as you mentioned, is a big actor in empowering governments in their, particularly in their health ministries. And here success would look like in our grant to support chai, success would be that they have empowered governments to build their in house capacity to analyze their own budgets and implement the improvements, to focus resources on the most effective programs and to cut costs in areas where they could cut costs. So here we'll be looking and following up for basically cases of where the government was able to integrate critical services, invest more in critical services like childhood immunization or malaria prevention, and to find cost saving efficiencies that can then sustain into future years. Now, this may not sound like the most exciting thing to everyone to analyze budgets and find Cost saving and reprioritize budget lines with this means is that if you can move even 1% of a budget as large as a Ministry of Health budget towards something more effective, you can save thousands of lives per year. And that budget line is likely to stick around into future years. And so you're now seeing that life saving potential year upon year and less vulnerability to future cuts as well. So this is what we're hoping to see for that kind of systems change success. And the second that I mentioned was around accelerating progress or removing bottlenecks. Again, I realize this can sound kind of vague, so maybe I'll give an example of what success could look like here. So another one of our recent grants was to address antimicrobial resistance. Some of your listeners may know that this is causing estimated 1 million preventable deaths a year and growing in low and middle income countries, which when I first heard this it felt like a. Yeah, a sneaky and surprising challenge. Also quite frightening. We know that there are market failures happening here and policy barriers where newer, more essential drugs and particularly antibiotics are not reaching low and middle income countries. So we have just just processed a grant to an organization called ARMOR which is funding them to identify opportunities to remove those barriers. So they are doing initial research on what are those barriers and where are there reasonable levers to remove those. Success in this kind of grant that's intending to remove bottlenecks and accelerate progress would be identifying even one idea that could accelerate access to even one drug. And we estimate that would save thousands of lives per year as well. These are the kinds of big bets that even if there's a small amount of success success, we estimate just exponential growth in life saving potential. I'll share one other example on the kind of funding proof of concept success. So this one also can be a bit vague and also very high potential. So I'll mention that there are many organizations out there who are innovating on what could improve the future for low and middle income countries in particular. One of those is the Lead Exposure Elimination Project or leap. And this is an organization that advocates to improve lead paint regulations in low and middle income countries which is a known risk for children's cognitive capabilities. Now we gave them flexible funding when they were just getting started and they are wonderfully growing to be a major international organization that has proven their model in multiple countries and attracted substantially more funding. So we are looking for things like this where we could find and launch the next leap. So new organizations that could really disrupt the status quo of things like policy or regulation to improve future generations well being ideally globally, not just in one country, you can see that we are putting a lot of emphasis on long term impact and we do a lot of quantitative heavy analysis as well. We're aiming for cost effectiveness targets that are 15 times the cost effectiveness of cash transfers, which is a challenging bar to meet. But you can see from these examples that we're also looking at the qualitative examples of interventions that could, based on case studies and forecasts, be game changers into the future. So we're willing to fund well evidenced interventions to scale up as well as bold ideas that might be more uncertain and hoping that with a portfolio of these things that some of them will pan out and that over the next five years we expect to then see very high returns across the portfolio as a whole.

B (27:18)

There's also the question of accountability in philanthropy. You know, public aid comes with scrutiny and reporting requirements that private giving often doesn't. And I wonder if you wanted to say anything about how you think the sector should approach transparency and learning without losing the flexibility that makes it so valuable.

A (27:37)

I'm glad you asked this because prior to joining Founders Pledge, I actually worked in a team at Innovations for Poverty Action that really focused on this question of how can we support funders to also manage their own modern evaluation and learning and to hold themselves accountable. It's a bit of a novel question, to be honest, because there is no one holding holding funders accountable. So I'm grateful that you're now turning this around at me after spending part of my career on asking funders that question. I think the ideal is that funders have they've made their grants based on a clear analysis of what their own priorities are in terms of the outcomes they're trying to optimize for and which grants could help to drive that forward and that through that process they are then following up to support the implementers to share back what they have learned so that the funders can then iterate on their own strategies and support the next step that will optimize even further. Sometimes that means implementers will learn their initial plans were needed to be iterated on halfway through the grant. And I think funders have a role of supporting empowering that iteration rather than sticking to an initial plan and then supporting whether there is a decision after that to move to the next stage or not. And I think trust is really important for implementers to feel comfortable sharing how things are going and where they would like to pivot next. And I think that that trust should go Both ways that funders can also be honest about what they are prioritizing and why and how they're assessing different opportunities against each other so that if a funder chooses to go with another opportunity, they can communicate back what that partner might want to consider in the future. And that partner can decide if those are similar considerations for them and something that they want to take into account to improve their own programming going forward or if they're prioritizing different things. So I think that transparency needs to go both directions and in terms of then accountability to the funders results, I think that the ideal is that we are reflecting backwards on which of our projections for how grants would go came forward. And how does that compare to how we are forecasting for our next grants so we can continue to learn and iterate on our own research evaluation of grants and report that back transparently at Founders Pledge. I think that that is happening increasingly so our researchers our tracking forecasts. For every evaluation we do, we then have clear outputs or early outcomes that we're following up on to assess. We might have said okay, there's a 20% chance that let's say one of the countries that the Clinton Health Access Initiative will make a big change in their budget. So maybe I'll follow up and ask how many of those countries had case studies to indicate there was a change made and we would mark that as correct if it matched our forecast and we actually track our researchers forecasting capabilities. So we're trying to hold ourselves accountable in that way. I think what we're improving on in the next year is then finding ways to integrate that into our upcoming grants. How can we use the learning that our partners are experiencing to inform how our strategy should shift for our grantmaking in the next cycle and how can we make sure to reflect and improve based on what our partners are learning. So I think in the next year we'll be improving that kind of internal learning agenda.

B (31:10)

I agree with you too. In terms of the relationship between funders and recipients, I think there's a just that open communication ends up being so important. Stepping back, should we see a sizable reduction in official development assistance that a number of people have predicted? How would you hope that philanthropic donors, not necessarily just founders, pledge respond and do you think they'll step up? What do you see as the biggest limitations and opportunities?

A (31:37)

That is a great question. I think first we need to start with a bit of an uncomfortable truth, which is that philanthropic capital is just unlikely to ever fully replace the total amount of official development assistance or aid at scale. So then we need to ask ourselves this question of where do we have comparative advice advantage to make the most impact in this landscape? And for us, that's the question of, okay, how can we have outsized impact for every dollar we're investing? And that's where we want to target our funding. And so for us, we're seeing that as opportunities where you can fund potentially something that for example, government won't be able to fund because it's higher risk, or there's not yet a proof of concept like we said, or that maybe it has a longer time horizon before a result will be clear. Philanthropic funding can provide that sort of seed capital and that initial investment. So that's where we're seeing a lot of potential. Of course that's not exclusive. There are opportunities for philanthropic funding to support scale up, which is also very critical. But we're seeing a unique window in that sort of higher risk, proof of concept, longer time horizon, higher uncertainty opportunities for philanthropy.

B (32:55)

When you think about this role of philanthropy over the next five or 10 years, what would good look like for the sector more broadly?

A (33:03)

I would say that philanthropic capital has a unique opportunity to support also private sector, to take ownership of aspects that could improve well being long term as well. So I think that there are opportunities for donors to support maybe riskier endeavors that private sector social enterprises could step in. Later on.

B (33:25)

We ask our podcast guests a couple of sort of standard questions. So the first is if you could wave a magic wand and change any policy in the world, what change would do the most good?

A (33:37)

I love that question. So despite working in global health and development, I would actually, actually say the lowest hanging fruit here would probably be ending factory farming. As many of us are aware, there's extreme suffering for the billions of animals that are in intensive factory farming today. And it would be very much within our control to end that. So this feels like a pretty easy win and very tractable. The benefit is that it would also help humans because it can reduce the pandemic risk, of course, and the need for antibiotic exposure of those animals. And founders pledge does actually have a focus on farm to animal welfare and animal welfare as well. So this is something that we are also looking at supporting longer term.

B (34:26)

Okay, and the second one is, can you share a memorable story from your work?

A (34:31)

There are many, but I think the funniest ones are the failures. So I'll share a good one about being wrong. So when I was back in Tanzania, much, much earlier on, back in 2015, I just moved for a new job and I was testing out solutions for a program that supported smallholder farmers. And I came in having just read the literature on what could support rural households and learned all about the risks from smoke inhalation and cooking indoors. And so I had this brilliant motivation to roll out improved cook stoves. I was very confident this would be well received because it reduces the need for firewood. Like I said, it avoids smoke inhalation and it improves the speed of cooking. So I thought of course, why wouldn't people want this? So we launched the trial. Fortunately it was a trial because nothing happened. Farmers did not want this cookstoves. It just was not what they were excited about. They were not asking for this. It was a great check on my own assumptions and a good reminder to have humility for a context that I'm not deeply familiar with. Fortunately, the killing that program was actually quite fun because it freed up our budget and our team to pivot. So eventually I should say it was honestly over probably a period of years, we learned to better listen to the desire for farmers to have long term kind of assets and livelihood sources and ended up running trials on high value tree seedlings. Most specifically and most excitingly, avocado was very popular and the uptake was really immediate and it was much more motivating to roll this out than my brilliant of idea of improved cookstoves and those trees are now producing fruit. So this was a really powerful lesson for me that attachment to ideas can actually prevent much bigger impact. It can be really challenging to let go of an initial idea. Pulling the plug on that is what allows you to find a good one. But all of this does really give me a lot of empathy for the many organizations out there that are needing to pivot every day and the importance of allowing for that iteration continually.

B (36:47)

And for listeners who are eager to follow along with your work and the Catalytic Impact Fund or have suggestions for opportunities that you might be interested in, where can they learn more? And you mentioned obviously the work you're doing to track and follow along with the impact that you're having. Where might they find more information about those investments?

A (37:07)

If you just search Founders Pledge and go to our Global Health and Development work or our Catalytic Impact Fund Fund website, you'll find updates there on our strategy, our reporting, our most recent grants. We are not currently seeking reactive ideas for new funding opportunities that may change in the future. So please do check back. We're actually going to consider if that could be useful in early 2026, so do check back. Then we may open that up again. And we will also make sure to be replaced, reporting back annually on how the fund is going, that kind of step back, reflection on our own accountability, like we were saying, and how important that is. So we're eager to follow through on what we are learning and share that with with the public more transparently as well. Great.

B (37:54)

Thanks again. This was a really interesting conversation. I enjoyed learning about the Catalytic Impact Fund and there are some terms that get thrown around. I think catalytic increasingly one of them. But how are you really thinking about, like the way in which your investments can accelerate progress in meaningful ways in the development space, especially amid so much turmoil and when we've been having to grapple with real uncertainty. I appreciate also all of your reflections on the role of philanthropy in a challenging policy context and about where we go from here, how we track impact, how we think about risk, and the importance of bringing humility to maybe all of these questions.

A (38:32)

Thank you, Erin. I think these were some of the most fun questions that I've been asked in an interview, so I'm grateful for the opportunity to go deeper on some of these things and eager to see what comes out next. Also from your podcast, thanks for having me.

B (38:46)

Absolutely. Check out more about the Catalytic Impact Fund on Founders Pledge's website. You can check out more of CGD's work on cgdev.org thanks again for tuning in.

A (39:07)

Thanks for listening to the CGD podcast. You can learn more about the topics discussed on our website@cgdev.org that's cgdev.org See you next time. SA.