Private donors are playing an increasingly significant role in international development. Foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation are increasingly becoming involved as they continue to give and expand the range of activities in the developing world. The same is true for new types of venture philanthropies, such as the Acumen Fund. With the OECD’s Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in mind, traditional bilateral and multilateral donors, from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development to the World Bank, are taking notice and are looking for ways to engage and coordinate their actions with these new actors.

For traditional donors to best engage these new private donors they need to have an understanding of who the biggest players are and in which ways they invest in development. Traditional donors also need to know where these foundations are involved and in which sectors they invest. On that basis, donors also need to understand implications of foundation engagement for the international aid architecture, including (among others) issues such as coherence (to what extent does increasing foundation engagement constitute a challenge for efforts to enhance donor harmonization, and what can be done about it), sustainability (to what extent can donors (and beneficiaries) rely on long-term foundation engagement in development) and innovation (in what areas can traditional donors learn from foundations).

Project Objectives

In light of this background, in October 2007 the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development commissioned GPPi to conduct a scoping study to provide a preliminary assessment of private donor engagement in international development. Building on a comprehensive literature review and a range of expert interviews, GPPi produced a policy paper for the BMZ providing an overview of current foundation activities in international development as well as a number of recommendations on how to improve coordination and cooperation with foundations. A version of this paper will be published in the GPPi Research Paper series in late spring 2008.