Gayle Martin is a senior manager at The Bridgespan Group, a global social impact advisor that works with mission-driven leaders, philanthropists, and impact investors to achieve breakthrough results in addressing society’s most important challenges and opportunities. Gayle is a leader in Bridgespan’s collaborative philanthropy practice, where she advises philanthropic collaboratives and leads research, and has over a decade of experience in the global health and development field. She holds a Master’s degree in Global Human Development from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a BA in Political Science and Spanish from the University of Michigan.
Communities around the world are facing a new kind of upheaval—not a pandemic or a natural disaster, but the sudden withdrawal of global aid amid increasing geopolitical volatility.
Major donor countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the United States, have substantially reduced aid. The US alone slashed aid spending by more than half in 2025. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development expects the global aid slump to continue in 2026 and beyond.
The consequences are severe: clinics have closed, health systems are stretched, and vaccination and nutrition programs decimated. Already hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, most of them children. One study projects that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030.
In the face of this crisis, community leaders remain deeply committed to the people they serve. Many are even asking: Could this moment create an inflection point, a chance to rebuild systems to be more just, resilient, locally rooted, sustainable, and self-reliant? What will it take to realize that vision?
At the Bridgespan Group, our research consistently demonstrates that broad collaboration—among funders, civil society organisations, governments, and the private sector—is essential for lasting social change. More than ever, given the scale of challenges facing the global health and development sector, collaboration is critical.
In our recent report, The Power of Collaboration at a Time of Volatility in Global Health and Development, we examines the specific role philanthropic collaboration can play in this period of volatility.
To be clear, philanthropy can’t—and shouldn’t—replace government aid, but it can play a catalytic role. It can spark innovation, mobilize partnerships, and invest in the infrastructure and leadership that make systems self-sustaining. That role is most powerful in close partnership with others.
"Collaboratives can offer ready-made avenues for learning while giving"
Philanthropic collaboratives, vehicles that align and direct resources and expertise, occupy a key position in this moment of great disruption. By aligning resources across funders toward shared goals, they can mobilize more capital and shared expertise than any single donor or foundation can do alone.
Our research—including 27 interviews with funders and collaborative leaders, a literature review of nearly 50 reports, and survey of over 50 global health and development collaboratives—reveals that these funding vehicles are largely insulated from Official Development Assistance (ODA) cuts.
Nearly 75 percent of the collaboratives we surveyed are largely not reliant on ODA and 80 percent plan to move the same amount of money or more compared to last year. Still, they are under strain in other ways as they face surging demand amid declining funder commitments. Our survey found that nearly 60 percent of respondents expect their funding to decrease, and nearly 20 percent anticipate it will remain flat.
Despite the strain, collaboratives still offer powerful strengths. They can move quickly to stabilise organizations through rapid regranting. Through deep connections to organisations and leaders on the ground, they can invest in long-term infrastructure and leadership capacity.
Funds such as Blood:Water, which is dedicated to ending HIV/AIDS and water crises, invest not just in programs, but in organizational resilience. Blood:Water pairs every programmatic dollar with a dollar dedicated to strengthening operations and leadership capacity. It also invests for eight years to ensure partners emerge less reliant on external aid.
Collaborative funds are also often experts at building bridges across actors and sectors—governments, civil society, multilaterals, and private investors—to drive systemic change.
Last year, against the backdrop of diminishing ODA funding, The END Fund partnered with the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union Commission, and the World Health Organization to convene more than 50 nations to not only assess the burden of neglected tropical disease (NTD) across the African continent but determine the financing needs for its elimination.
The convening led to an unprecedented endorsement by these member states of a continent-wide plan to track resource allocation, advocate for sustainable financing, and drive locally owned solutions to end NTDs by 2030.
Promising examples of institutional philanthropy collaborating directly with government have emerged as well. The ELMA Foundation, for example, has long worked to reduce HIV infections in children across Africa and worked particularly closely with the South African National Department of Health.
When the funding cuts decimated HIV and AIDS service delivery and care, ELMA quickly convened fellow funders—including the FirstRand Empowerment Foundation—along with the National Department of Health and the National Treasury to develop a plan to integrate HIV services into the primary health care system, allowing services to continue.
Other collaborative efforts offer complementary lessons. In the wake of USAID cuts, Project Resource Optimization—a donor platform launched with support from the CRI Foundation—mobilised $110m in just six months to rescue 81 high-impact health and humanitarian projects at risk of termination. It leveraged existing expertise and data to rapidly channel funds where they could have the greatest immediate impact.
The END Fund, Project Resource Optimization, Blood:Water, and the ELMA Foundation offer a simple but powerful lesson: when we align behind shared purpose, with humility and mutual respect, we can achieve outcomes that once felt out of reach.
For donors looking to fund new geographies or issue areas, or those who feel they lack the time to fully source and research more bespoke giving options, collaboratives can offer ready-made avenues for learning while giving.
Collaboratives can even identify organisations to fund directly in the future. For donors worried about being “a drop in the bucket,” giving together with other donors to support systems-level change can offer a chance to meet the problem at a scale they couldn’t achieve alone.
Now is the time for both deep commitment to collaborative funds and a broader, system-wide embrace of “big-C” collaboration—where donors, governments, and communities work in true partnership toward shared goals.