{
  "id": 16654082,
  "title": "Billionaires can’t fill the $50 billion foreign-aid gap. The World Bank wants to make their money go further",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/26/billionaires-cant-fill-the-50-billion-foreign-aid-gap-the-world-bank",
  "topic": "finance",
  "section": "Finance & Markets",
  "published": "2026-10-26T19:07:50.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fortune",
    "slug": "fortune",
    "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/world-bank-philanthropy-hub-billionaires-foreign-aid-gap/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has pledged to donate approximately $200 billion before his charitable foundation concludes operations by 2045. This generosity, however, falls short of the $50 billion in foreign aid that wealthy nations collectively reduced in 2025, representing a 23.1% decrease, the largest ever recorded. The World Bank aims to bridge this gap by leveraging the financial resources of private philanthropy to augment its lending capabilities.\n\nAt the inaugural World Bank Group Philanthropy Forum in Bangkok on October 12, the bank unveiled its Philanthropy Hub—a centralized platform designed to facilitate connections between foundations, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals with the bank's extensive lending network. The Hub's objective is to enable private donors to channel their contributions into the bank's flagship initiatives, which target critical areas such as energy access, health systems, water management, and agriculture.\n\nThe World Bank contends that private philanthropy should fund the early stages of innovative projects, allowing the bank to scale up successful ventures through its established lending programs. This approach is in contrast to the idea of private donors replacing government-funded aid entirely. While some private foundations have already stepped in to support specific programs that lost U.S. funding, the scale of the $50 billion shortfall remains significant.\n\nNotably, the United States alone cut its foreign aid by 57% in 2025, and the OECD anticipates a further 5.8% decline in donor contributions in 2026. The Gates Foundation, which spends around $9 billion annually, acknowledged that recent declines in development assistance have contributed to a rise in child mortality rates, with deaths of children under five increasing for the first time in a century. The bank's strategy does not involve foundations directly replacing government aid but rather supplementing it by funding early-stage innovations that can later be scaled through public and private investments.\n\nThe forum attracted over 200 leaders from various philanthropic organizations, including the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, the Institute of Philanthropy, OECD's netFWD, and the Philanthropy Asia Alliance. Asian philanthropic leaders have committed to funding the bank's \"missions,\" which include initiatives to connect 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa to electricity by 2030 and expand affordable healthcare to 1.5 billion people. The bank's approach is to provide foundations with access to the bank's policy expertise, country relationships, and larger funding resources, albeit at the cost of some independence.",
  "summary": "Rich countries are cutting aid at a record pace. The World Bank’s new Philanthropy Hub asks foundations and family offices to route their money through its lending machine, and it’s promising them leverage.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}