A major American aid group is promising to deliver more medicines in high-need areas around the world after receiving its largest ever donation. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
Americares, a nonprofit that supports thousands of health centers globally, announced a $50 million gift Wednesday from an unidentified Connecticut family. The contribution represents an unusual expansion at a time when the United States' sudden aid cuts have hamstrung programs ranging from maternal and child health to HIV treatment and prevention.
"They definitely understood the moment and wanted to do more to respond to that," Christine Squires, the president and CEO of Americares, said of the donor.
Individual philanthropists and charitable foundations have sought to plug some funding holes in the 18 months since President Donald Trump upended the U.S. Agency for International Development. A British billionaire funded nutritional peanut paste. Former USAID employees raised more than $125 million to buoy dozens of critical aid programs. The Gates Foundation narrowed its priorities.
Global health of all USAID's targets has received much of the attention from big donors, according to Susan Appe, a University at Albany associate professor of public administration and policy who has researched how nonprofits deal with the changing whims of donor countries. That's reasonable, she said, considering "lives are on the line." Jeff Bezos' parents, for example, committed up to $500 million last March for UNICEF's Child Nutrition Fund.
Experts agree that high-net-worth donors could never save every program lost by the billions of dollars cut from U.S. spending on global health. But there was an expectation that more philanthropists would step up to support the causes advanced by USAID.
"I think that a lot of philanthropy scholars like myself have been a bit disappointed with the lag of response," Appe said. "It's kind of, to some degree, business as usual."