Philanthropy Made a Flurry of Commitments During the UN Meeting. Here’s Where the Money is Headed

blurAZ/shutterstock

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) meeting in New York is always a busy time for global funders, who, by and large, align their giving with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, set by the global community in 2015. But the response around the 77th Session was particularly robust, and delivered with a sense of urgency that turned the sidelines of the UNGA into the front lines of global philanthropy.

The groundswell of support came at a critical time. After grappling with the fallout from COVID, climate and war in Ukraine, there’s a very real chance that the targets for a healthy, sustainable and equitable world anchored in peace and prosperity will not be met by 2030.

According to a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Goalkeepers report, nearly every indicator of human progress is off track at this, the halfway point toward meeting goals. UN Secretary-General António Guterres characterized the moment as a time of “great peril” for our world — and acknowledged that a “rescue mission” was necessary to help get SDG goals back on track.

Funding toward progress on SDGs sits mostly at the government level, but private funding has always been a significant part of the mix. In addition to the UNGA itself, related satellite events often serve as mechanisms to generate and publicize new funding pledges.

Despite understandable donor fatigue, commitments were flying this year, and often measured in the millions. As world leaders grappled with high-level diplomacy — and New Yorkers faced down the kind of traffic it hadn’t seen in years — here’s how support flowed in through the high-profile events.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

As one of the leading private global development funders, and with Bill Gates himself a frequent fundraiser for SDG-related causes, it won’t come as a surprise that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was a major player last week. After a two-year hiatus, the Gates Foundation hosted its fourth Goalkeepers event, a convening of changemakers that’s part of a larger commitment to advancing global goals. The focus this year was on accelerating progress.

In the course of a week, the foundation announced a total of $1.27 billion in commitments to advance SDGs alongside governments, other philanthropies, the private sector, NGOs and global and community leaders.

That included a $912 million pledge to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, its largest commitment to the fund yet; $100 million to alleviate the food crisis and its causes; $200 million to expand global digital public infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries, (LMICs), and $50 million to catalyze contributions to a Partners in Health Scholarship Fund at the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda. 

Beyond a $20 million bump in its support for UNICEF, food crisis interventions from Gates included support for a Global Agriculture and Food Security Program alongside national governments in Africa and South Asia; a partnership to make fertilizers accessible to smallholder farmers in Africa; and a Nigerian-based research center’s work on crop yield and variety. (Be sure to check out Philip Rojc’s recent opinion piece on prominent critiques of Gates and other global philanthropies.)

The $50 million to UGHE in Rwanda will support scholarships for a student body that’s 75% women, and is aimed at increasing the number of healthcare workers in the country and around the world.

Bloomberg Philanthropies

Mike Bloomberg and his philanthropy have increasingly moved to center stage in global giving through a combination of his enormous footprint in climate change and public health funding. So again, it was no surprise that he stepped up.

As climate action funders countdown to COP27 in November, Bloomberg Philanthropies co-hosted an Earthshot Prize Innovation Summit and the UN Climate Action: Race to Zero and Resilience Forum, which brought together partners from world leaders to activists. It yielded major investments that included the $204 million launch of the Bloomberg Ocean Initiative, which will support data-driven solutions to safeguarding marine ecosystems and biodiversity. 

At the same time, Bloomberg was again tapped to serve as the WHO’s global ambassador for noncommunicable diseases (NCDS) like heart and lung disease, a key target within SDG 3, to assure health and wellbeing for all. He also retains his appointed position as UN special envoy on climate ambition and solutions.

Clinton Global Initiative

The Clinton Global Initiative, or CGI, which had been put on pause with the scrutiny and potential conflicts surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, roared back to life as a busy and buzzy announcement hub and a popular hang-out for participants between the numerous events taking place around the city. Grabbing coffee, one panelist said about its return, “If this didn’t already exist, someone would’ve had to invent it.”

Between events that included a one-on-one call between former President Bill Clinton and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Bono discussing his efforts on behalf of the Global Fund, 144 “Commitments to Action” came in across the public and private sectors to address climate change, health equity, inclusive economic growth and the global refugee crisis.

Philanthropic commitments flowed though many of the sessions, and as we’ve come to expect from the Clintons, CGI rallied both star power and major investments. Actor Matt Damon and Gary White’s introduction of Water.org’s new $50 million Water & Climate Fund, for example, included an announcement of $10 million in seed money from Amazon. Hillary Clinton led a meaningful spotlight discussion on maternal health alongside a commitment of almost $2 million over two years from Becton, Dickinson and Company and the J&J Foundation to strengthen nursing associations in Africa. And a discussion on climate featured a $13.9 million commitment over four years from the Dutch Postcode Lottery Group, one of the largest philanthropies in the world, to support flexible funding for a program that aims to train more than 100,000 smallholder farmers across Africa and Latin America in climate-smart practices.

United Nations funds

Meanwhile, UN-created funds drew support for priorities like nutrition, education and global health.

To move the needle on SDG 2, Zero Hunger, UNICEF hosted “The Child Malnutrition Crisis: Pledging to Save Lives,” along with United States Agency for International Development (USAID), CIFF and the government of Senegal. 

Across all forms of support, the event garnered roughly $280 million toward a total half-billion dollars in total pledges — 60% of which will directly support UNICEF’s work in 15 of the hardest-hit countries. Pledges to UNICEF will help prevent, detect and treat child wasting, and expand access to life-saving RUTF, short for ready-to-use therapeutic food.

Philanthropic commitments have been growing since July to aid the crisis, with several new investments from Greta Thunberg Foundation, King Philanthropies and Dangote Foundation. At the event, CIFF boosted its already substantial wasting portfolio with a pledge of $40 million. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints pledged $5 million to UNICEF’s No Time to Waste Malnutrition Campaign, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $20 million to UNICEF’s Child Nutrition Fund, doubling its previous commitment.

Ahead of a planned high-level financing conference next February, Education Cannot Wait, the UN’s global fund for education in acute and extended emergencies, drew a new, $25 million commitment from the LEGO Foundation that was announced at a Global Citizen Festival in Central Park.

Created by the United Nations in 2002 and endowed by the world’s wealthiest nations, the Global Fund raises and moves more than $4 billion a year in the movement to eradicate some of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, including malaria, HIV and TB. The fund was active during the UNGA, with a call to action across government, NGOs and the private sector.

The Global Fund’s U.S.-hosted Seventh Replenishment Conference drew major commitments from the philanthropic sector, including activist investor and co-founder of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Sir Chris Hohn, who, in a recent guest opinion piece for IP, called this year a tipping point that requires philanthropists to bring their global health responses to scale. In response, CIFF made a $33 million catalytic investment in the fund to accelerate progress on stemming transmission of HIV.

Additional contributions included the J&J Foundation and Skoll Foundation’s partnership on a $25 million anchor investment to accelerate the professionalization of community health workers, and $20 million from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Abbott Fund for a fund to strengthen laboratory systems, regional collaboration and data sharing.

By the end of the week, Global Fund partners had raised more than $14.25 billion. Private sector donors reached a new high of $1.23 billion, led by the $912 million pledge from Gates and (RED), the global health marketing and branding initiative, which committed to $150 million.

Elsewhere on the epidemic front, Rotary International Foundation, an early leader in eradicating polio, made a three-year, $150 million pledge to its longtime partner, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a public-private partnership led by governments and core partners like GAVI and the CDC. Asked about the level of leadership she was seeing, Jennifer Jones, president of Rotary International, said, “I think the pandemic was a global leadership level set. Every man, woman and child traversed through this together, and no one was exempt. And consequently, I see an important leadership style emerging that is bold, courageous, and most importantly, empathetic.”

 “Up to all of us”

By any standard, UNGA was a banner week for the global philanthropy community. But much more work lies ahead.

In Gates’s Goalkeepers Report, Melinda French Gates summarized by saying, “There are times in history when the path of progress is predictable and linear; when you can predict what will happen tomorrow based on what occurred today. But we do not live in those times.”

If the first half of the SDG era showed how unexpected crises could “set back progress in unanticipated ways, what will the second half bring?”

“That’s up to all of us,” she wrote.