Philanthropy Can't Fill the Aid Gap. Here's What It Can Do.

This essay was edited and structured with the assistance of Claude, an AI writing tool. The research, analysis, and arguments are my own.

Every week I see another version of the same headline. Philanthropy stepping up as bilateral aid steps back.

And every week I want to say: please stop.

Not because foundations aren't doing important work. They are. But the "philanthropy fills the gap" framing sets everyone up for failure, and papers over the gaping hole left by the exit of established development organizations. (I'm talking here, obviously, about the utter dismantling of USAID, but also acknowledging that many other countries' development organizations saw significant cuts this year).

At issue is the not only the scale of the challenge, but also the scope. Scale first. In Georgia, we ran a $234M integrated program. In Afghanistan, $250M in agribusiness. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's entire annual global health spend is around $5B, and that's the largest private foundation on the planet. The math doesn't work for replication at global scale, full stop.

But scope is where I think the framing breaks down in a more fundamental way. Philanthropy and bilateral aid were never doing the same thing, even when they looked similar on paper.

Bilateral programs, at best, carried sovereign relationships, budget support architecture, trade policy leverage, and the credibility that comes from government-to-government accountability. Foundations carry flexibility, speed, and appetite for risk that government procurement rules make nearly impossible.

The one cannot replace the other because they are fundamentally different, and that's a good thing for both angles. Catalytic capital. Proof-of-concept funding. Backing locally-led organizations that can't navigate USAID's compliance architecture. That's where foundations have genuine comparative advantage, and where their dollars go further precisely because they're not trying to be bilateral aid.

Those approaches, though, can't address every need, which means the real opportunity right now isn't "can philanthropy fill the gap?" It's: can philanthropy do the things it was always better positioned to do, now that the sector is being forced to rethink which tools belong where? And can they find alternatives to approach the parts of development that were uniquely to the government development agency structure. How do you replicate the 'inherently govenmental function' without the inherently governmental infrastructure and funding?

My expectation: No, the gap isn't fillable, and you can't replace one approach with the other entirely. Some of what's been lost is genuinely gone, and we should be honest about that with ourselves and with the communities we work in.

The questions we have to sit with now are: How do we reframe philanthropy to fill the gaps that we can? What are the other mechanisms that can be used to fill the ones we can't, even if the way we fill them isn't remotely the same? How much of what we've lost is salveageable, the knowledge, the human capacity, the purely technical solutions, and how much will we have to rebuild from zero, if we can ever rebuild at all?