How We’re Amplifying Donor Impact in a Post-USAID Landscape

When USAID funding was suddenly suspended earlier this year, we partnered with The Life You Can Save to launch the Rapid Response Fund (RRF), designed to keep affected high-impact programs running.

The crisis hasn’t ended. Recently leaked spreadsheets show that over 86% of the U.S.’s global aid programs have been terminated.

The RRF has raised over $6M in less than four months. Over the past few months, we’ve continued deploying urgent grants to fill funding gaps for high-impact organizations delivering lifesaving interventions. At the same time, we’ve also facilitated donor coordination at a time when the sector needs to work in unison, recognizing that pooled philanthropic dollars can go farther than donors working alone.

Two urgent grants to lifesaving interventions

We’ve continued deploying high-impact grants to lifesaving interventions that protect children from preventable diseases, most recently with two grants to Jhpiego and Jon Snow International (JSI).

Jhpiego’s antimalarial medicine program in Cameroon

In Cameroon, over 11,000 people die of malaria during the rainy season every year, many of them children under the age of five.

Jhpiego had been fighting malaria in Cameroon since 2018 by implementing an intervention called seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC). The program works by giving children preventive antimalarial medicine during peak transmission seasons.

SMC is remarkably cost-effective, reducing malaria deaths by an estimated 79% among those who receive it during the seasonal period when it's delivered. In areas where GiveWell supports SMC programs, GiveWell estimates that the intervention is about 10–28x as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people living in poverty. When USAID funding was frozen, Jhpiego’s proven SMC program faced immediate shutdown.

The freeze has created an urgent need for evidence-focused funders to work together—which is where the RRF’s role as a coordinating mechanism comes in. Our partners at GiveWell identified and evaluated a large funding gap at Jhpiego, and the RRF moved rapidly to help fill it.

This month, the RRF granted $600,000 to Jhpiego to continue implementing seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) campaigns while the organization waits to see if and when funding from the U.S. government will be restored. Children in Cameroon's Far North and North regions will continue to have access to cost-effective treatments that keep them safe from one of the leading causes of child mortality.

Oumarou Mamadou, a father of seven living in the village of Ouro Kawobiri, used to worry about malaria every rainy season. As part of Jhpiego’s SMC campaign, a community health worker began visiting Oumarou’s home every rainy season to deliver preventative malaria medication to his children. Oumarou said, “My children are strong and healthy. I keep all their vaccination cards and ensure close follow-up.”

Photo: Marcel Eka for Jhpiego

JSI’s childhood vaccination project in Mozambique

In Mozambique, approximately 320 children under the age of 5 die every day from preventable diseases like malaria and pneumonia. Routine childhood immunizations are among the most cost-effective public health interventions available, since they protect children from deadly diseases at an extraordinarily low cost.

Due to halted USAID funding, two provinces in Mozambique were seeing rising numbers of unvaccinated and under-immunized children. Antigens, syringes and other consumables for vaccinating children had already been purchased, but without funding for distribution mechanisms, there was no way for these vaccinations to reach the children who needed them.

This month, we’ve made the first $1M installation of an anticipated $2M grant supporting John Snow International (JSI)’s project to deliver essential childhood vaccinations to over 700,000 children under 5 in two provinces in Mozambique over one year. JSI’s mobile brigade outreach services will reach remote communities where children would otherwise go unprotected.

This project will likely prevent more than 550 deaths among children under 5 by providing continued access to basic vaccines that have been saving lives for decades.

A new collaboration for philanthropic response

One problem we see consistently is that critical lifesaving programs similar to those run by Jhpiego and JSI need to reach a minimum budget in order to continue operating. The amount most donors are able to contribute often only partially fills that budget, which isn’t enough to support these highly cost-effective, lifesaving interventions.

In response to this need, Founders Pledge and The Life You Can Save have partnered with the Project Resource Optimization (PRO) Initiative to offer a new donation match option through our Rapid Response Fund.

Here's how it works: Individual donors make conditional commitments to selected projects. If other donors contribute at least 70% of a project's budget, we commit to funding the final 30% from the Rapid Response Fund. This approach reduces risk for individual donors while ensuring programs get fully funded rather than partially supported.

The result? Donations go further, and implementers get the funding certainty they need to operate effectively.

This collaboration represents more than just coordination—it's piloting a new model for how philanthropy can respond to crises. By pooling donations from multiple donors and matching individual contributions with money from our Rapid Response Fund, we're making it easier for donors of all sizes to support high-impact programs.

The funding gaps created by USAID's suspension are massive—we can't fill them all. But we can preserve the most effective programs and demonstrate that philanthropy, when deployed strategically, can keep critical interventions running.

If you’d like to make your first donation, upgrade your existing donation, or start a monthly contribution, you can donate to the Rapid Response Fund here.