Organizations serving marginalized people around the world have long been dreaming of a quiet knock of inquiry from MacKenzie Scott’s team of advisors. Now, while a certain air of mystery remains around the whos and whys of receiving funding from what is now known as Yield Giving, potential grantees have a lot more to go on.
In late December 2022, Scott dropped a new list of hundreds of donations, followed by a long-awaited website, complete with a gifts database and the promise of a future open call for funding.
Thanks to the new Yield Giving database, nonprofits can now see how their work might fit within one of the largest streams of philanthropic support in history, a portfolio that so far totals roughly $14 billion. While it’s been mostly focused on the United States, that includes a growing amount of global giving. The new data shows that about $1 billion of the funding Scott’s executed since 2019 is international in nature, and that more than 100 of the roughly 1,600 organizations she’s supported thus far characterized their work as global.
By expanding that pool to include recipients doing both global and regional work focused outside of North America, we’ve identified 276 gifts, or about 17% of the total number of recipients. While many of the dollar amounts have not yet been disclosed, reported gifts add up to around $2.27 billion. There’s a lot of overlap, as many grantees list multiple geographies and topics, but some priorities emerge in this cohort based on grantee-reported geographies of service:
Sub-Saharan Africa: 104 gifts tagged with this region
Latin American & the Caribbean: 77 gifts (We previously reported a major focus on Brazil; read more here.)
South Asia: 60 gifts
East Asia and the Pacific: 20 gifts
Europe and Central Asia: 19 gifts
Middle East and North Africa: 17 gifts
How that money is being spent within those borders is more difficult to parse, in part because of the unrestricted nature of Scott’s funding. But we are able to gain some insights into priorities by topic. Among the 274 gifts going toward work occurring outside of North America, here’s how totals break down, again with the caveats of overlap and undisclosed amounts:
Health: 126 gifts tagged with this issue area
Equity and Justice: 126 gifts
Economic Security and Opportunity: 87 gifts
Education: 87 gifts
Environment: 79 gifts
Democracy and Civic and Social Engagement: 64 gifts
Arts and Culture: 19 gifts
All of this reinforces several of the patterns we’ve been watching unfold, blog post by blog post, including Scott’s stated focus on equity, concern for public health, partially prompted by COVID-19, and interests in key locations like Brazil, India and parts of Africa.
What the latest round of giving tells us about Yield’s priorities
Philanthropy — and IP — have been eagerly awaiting the Yield database for some time now, and for good reason. It provides a critical bird’s-eye view of where this massive philanthropic project is directing its billions.
But we’ve also been tracking Scott’s funding across a number of throughlines, watching how it’s progressed over the years with each announcement of new donations. The latest tranche, announced in November, continues to shed light on the characteristics that define Yield’s global funding.
From the start, Scott’s global giving has carried through on some key themes: rebalancing inequity, supporting women and girls, and creating a greener world, typically at the local or community level. The latest tranche is no different, while amplifying her ambition to keep solutions “of and by” the populations she hopes to lift. It’s also worth noting that Scott applied the disability community’s maxim, “nothing about us without us,” to her global giving by involving community-based groups in most of her funding and tapping local leaders as change agents.
And, of course, Scott’s global portfolio is expanding, with more than 40 organizations in the latest round. That includes sustained support in a few key regions, including Africa, Latin America and India. Look for coverage of that regional giving in a future post, but for now, here are some trends we’re seeing in Yield’s latest list of global donations.
Local, evidence-based approaches to development
A hallmark of Scott’s global giving is an emphasis on efforts that are community-based and evidence-based, which we can see by drilling down to the work of individual recipients.
One example is a recent $5 million in support of the Global Fund for Community Foundations, or GFCF, which moves to shift power to the people it represents by aligning with local resources and capacity. More specifically, it builds an evidence base for people-led development, nurtures community philanthropy, conducts convenings to raise public discourse on the issues, and collaborates with donor and development groups.
From offices in South Africa and Northern Ireland, GFCF made grants to 81 community philanthropy groups in 41 countries in 2020–2021, totaling more than $1.5 million. That includes the research grant it made to the West Africa Civil Society Institute to connect innovation with localization, working with civil society and development actors like Save the Children Denmark and NEAR.
Similarly, a $10 million investment went to the Global Fund for Children, which works with community-based organizations around the globe to help children thrive and understand their rights. Over 20 years, it has invested more than $56 million in more than 1,000 community groups across Asia, the Americas, Africa, Europe and Eurasia. The issues of child trafficking, gender equality, youth empowerment and education all sit within its sights.
Two other investments back an evidence-based approach to global development. First is the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, or 3ie, whose core work is developing evaluations of impact among international development programs in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Its work is intended to inform policies and practices for use by decision-makers, including governments.
Calling Scott’s $4.5 million in unrestricted funding “hugely motivating,” Executive Director Marie Gaarder said it will help 3ie advance its “mission of improving lives through evidence-informed decision-making,” while committing to work with partners to use that evidence effectively.
Scott’s $8 million donation to Innovations for Poverty Action’s work is also all about the evidence. IPA creates and shares the data that decision-makers need to lift Indians from poverty and scale interventions. Arriving on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, the organization said it would use Scott’s $8 million in funding to further its mission, calling it “an important vote of confidence” in its work, its people and its evidence-based approach to finding solutions.
Since its founding, IPA has worked with more than 400 leading academics on more than 600 evaluations in 51 countries. Contributions include groundbreaking work on using chlorine dispensers for safe water, and divining the long-lasting impacts of school-based deworming.
Scott also supported a people-centric approach to shifting economic inequities. Busara Center for Behavioral Economics applies the tenets of behavioral science to assuaging poverty. It aims to empower individuals to determine the economic contours of their lives. Her $2.5 million donation toward its work will span more than 25 countries across the Global South. For example, one researcher from the University of Nairobi, Peter Babyenda, developed a game that examines ways to influence farmers to adapt to changing climate. Another, a behavioral science case study in Busi, Thika, examined ways to motivate community health workers, the linchpins of local medical ecosystems.
Scott also backed the Global Development Incubator, or GDI, with $5 million in funding. GDI takes an unconventional, “transformational development” approach to incubating, developing and scaling new social impact solutions. Its 12- to 36-month model deploys teams to discover problems and develop early-stage solutions, build teams and infrastructure, and then exit upon launch. Initiatives include Aceli Africa, which hopes to drive investment toward small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises, and Huiling, China’s largest organization serving adults with disabilities.
Improving health outcomes
Two recent global donations aim to bring improved health outcomes to ordinary citizens — one that puts COVID alerts in the palms of their hands, and one that helps correct their vision.
COVID was one of Scott’s early priorities and, of course, it isn’t over. Yield continues to help people negotiate the pandemic by connecting them to trusted information. The Praekelt.org tool she funded has the capacity to reach 2 billion people globally through a multi-language messaging system from the World Health Organization and HealthConnect. Individual countries and global health systems can also use the information to boost their response.
Praekelt’s work has also drawn funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ELMA Foundation, Ford Foundation and Omidyar Network. The organization stated that the $6 million unrestricted gift it received from Scott will bring it “closer to realizing a world we’ve always imagined. A world in which personal, uninterrupted healthcare is available to everyone, not just a chance few.”
Scott also gave $15 million to VisionSpring, a nonprofit that addresses poor vision for workers in developing countries like India, Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda. VisionSpring said that funding will unlock $1 billion in earning potential for low-income artisans and agricultural workers in the coffee, tea and cocoa industries.
Regaining sight can be transformational on an individual level. CEO Ella Gudwin called the gift “an incredible acknowledgement of the power of a simple pair of eyeglasses to unlock earning, learning, safety and wellbeing for people vulnerable to poverty.”
That work syncs with the $20 million gift Scott made in March to U.S.-based Sightsavers, which works to eliminate avoidable blindness and support people living with sight challenges.
Green giving, clean water
Another critical area of Scott’s global development work has been with green groups, as covered in depth by IP’s Michael Kavate. Organizations that received funding this time around include $15 million to the Global Greengrants Fund, $10 million to the Foundation for Ecological Security in India, and two organizations in Brazil: $10 million to Foundation for Amazon Sustainability and unquantified support for Instituto Socioambiental.
As over 2 billion people in the world struggle without safe water and sanitation, Scott also backed Water for People, which works directly across nine countries to establish access to clean water, sanitation solutions and hygiene education, or WASH. The database shows six additional organizations finding water solutions.
Katherine Williford, the organization’s chief growth officer, called the $15 million in unrestricted support it received an “exciting” development that comes at a “critical juncture.”
WFP took data and insights gleaned at a background audit conducted in 2008 to rethink its scale and volunteer delivery model, then realigned it to work with governments and people on the ground. When local communities are ready, WFP leaves project service and sustainability in their hands.
Supporting working women
One final area deserves special attention, and it’s one of the issues IP celebrated as a rising priority in our latest round of Philanthropy Awards — worker power. Informal workers across the globe got a boost from Scott. Yield backed Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, or WIEGO, a global network that focuses entirely on empowering the 61% of the world’s workers who make their living in the informal economy.
The $7 million investment will expand its focus on women, its work to secure fair incomes and safe working environments, and fund the kind of research and knowledge gathering that can be used to influence government at a policy level.
Empowering women. A greener planet. Better health outcomes. Stay tuned, as we track the many ways Scott is seeking to support solutions by the people to problems of the people.