From Rapid Response to Lasting Impact: Launching the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund

In early 2025, the global health and development (GHD) community was rocked by sudden, severe U.S. foreign aid cuts and the dismantling of USAID. These cuts created an immediate crisis for effective organizations delivering lifesaving services in low- and middle-income countries.

In response, Founders Pledge and The Life You Can Save launched the Rapid Response Fund, an emergency measure to provide fast, flexible support. In just six months, the Fund raised and granted over $12 million, helping organizations maintain essential programs and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. By initial estimates, the RRF supported programs that saved the lives of more than 4,000 children.

Six months on, it is clear these cuts are not temporary. They have become the new baseline for U.S. foreign aid for the near future. While the Rapid Response Fund helped stabilize partners through the initial shock, public attention and donations have naturally waned. The need, however, has not.

Why a new approach is needed

What began as a temporary funding freeze in January has become the new reality—and our response is evolving to match. We’re closing donations to the Rapid Response Fund on August 31, 2025, and opening the next chapter of our Global Health & Development work: the Catalytic Impact Fund.

The GHD Catalytic Impact Fund (CIF) will build on the work of the Rapid Response Fund, expanding our focus from meeting urgent needs to driving long-term, systemic change. While the Rapid Response Fund helped maintain critical programs during the initial months of the emergency, the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund will support catalytic opportunities that create lasting improvement in health and economic outcomes.

Under the leadership of our new Fund Manager, Katrina Sill, the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund—previously called the GHD Fund—is relaunching with a refreshed strategy. The CIF targets opportunities where a relatively small philanthropic investment can generate outsized returns, including interventions that:

• Trigger systemic improvements: Supporting investments that create lasting infrastructure or increase cost-effectiveness of existing systems.
• Remove key bottlenecks: Identifying and eliminating barriers that accelerate progress.
• Crowd in capital: Providing early-stage funding that attracts substantial follow-on investment.

The catalytic impact of our GHD work

Even before we launched the CIF, the GHD program at Founders Pledge had been identifying and supporting catalytic opportunities that would multiply the impact of our members’ donations. Here, we highlight three grants that exemplify our catalytic strategy, past and present.

CHAI TSUs: Strengthening health systems during crisis

When USAID froze global health funding in early 2025, ten Sub-Saharan African countries lost an average of 14% of their health budgets overnight. Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)’s Technical Support Units will operate within these contexts to co-develop solutions with government officials to protect critical health services—helping stretch scarce resources by identifying cost-saving measures and shifting funds to the programs that save the most lives.

At this critical moment, as governments revise their health budgets in response to funding disruptions, we’re committing to a grant to CHAI TSUs that will be jointly funded by contributions from both Funds—at least $800K from the Rapid Response Fund and $200K from the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund—bridging our transition from crisis response to catalytic systems change.

Each dollar spent on technical assistance influences hundreds of dollars in government health spending, which makes this grant over 10 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers. This grant is an investment in strengthening national systems—empowering governments to make more strategic use of limited resources and building sustainable paths to impact.

Source: CHAI

LEEP: Eliminating lead poisoning via policy advocacy

One in three children worldwide suffer from lead poisoning, yet lead poisoning receives minimal philanthropic attention—less than $10M globally. Paint is a major source of lead exposure, causing neurological damage, behavioral issues, and even coma or death.

Our $160,000 grant to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) in 2022 made us one of the first major funders to support their mission of eliminating lead from paint, and enabled them to demonstrate proof of concept for their work. Through research and strategic advocacy, LEEP has secured government commitments to introduce regulations in multiple countries, including Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and Madagascar, and are expanding their work to up to 50 countries.

Rather than directly treating affected children—an endless approach—LEEP creates permanent regulatory infrastructure that prevents exposure at its source via large-scale policy change. Our early funding likely played a role in attracting follow-on investment: other funders like Open Philanthropy made grants to LEEP after they demonstrated proof-of-concept, and in 2024, USAID and UNICEF later announced a $150M partnership for a lead-free future.

Source: LEEP

EITI: Reducing corruption to unlock economic growth

Many resource-rich countries suffer from the "resource curse," where extractive industries fuel corruption and perpetuate poverty instead of creating shared prosperity. Providing temporary economic aid or running short anti-corruption campaigns fails to address the root of the problem.

In 2024, we made a $201K grant to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which helps countries build permanent governance infrastructure—transparency standards, accountability mechanisms, and oversight systems.

Research shows EITI member countries have meaningfully higher GDP increases than comparable non-members.¹ In Nigeria alone, EITI disclosures helped identify $20B in recoverable revenues, with $3B already recovered. Our grant supports priority countries like South Africa, Brazil, Rwanda, Chile, Botswana and Namibia to become and remain EITI members—increasing economic growth in LMICs by many multiples of the dollars we’ve invested.

Source: EITI

Join us in building long-term solutions

Filling urgent gaps is critical—but being purely reactive is not enough. If we don't continue supporting already neglected issues now, they'll become even more neglected in the future.

The dramatic reduction in U.S. foreign aid remains urgent, creating lasting challenges that require your support. Rather than just maintaining existing programs, we're building the infrastructure, policies, and systems that will strengthen global health and development for the long term. Every grant is designed to multiply impact beyond our initial funding, creating sustainable change that reaches far more people than direct aid alone.

If you'd like to support this work, we invite you to donate to the GHD Catalytic Impact Fund.

Notes

1. See Corrigan (2017). Panel regression analyses suggest that countries that join EITI have meaningfully higher increases in GDP in the years after joining than comparable resource-rich countries that do not join. This effect is especially pronounced for the most resource-dependent countries. ↩