WASHINGTON — A division of the U.S. Agency for International Development eliminated by Trump administration cuts last year was reborn Thursday as an independent nonprofit, allowing its international work to continue in a new form.
This reincarnation of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures as the nonprofit DIV Fund is thanks to $48 million raised from two private donors. It is a rare instance of continuation after the Trump administration froze all foreign funding last year and unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to tear down the agency that delivered U.S. foreign aid for 60 years.
Out of that destruction, which cost tens of thousands of jobs and caused people around the world to die, many private efforts were made to preserve decades of data and knowledge housed at USAID, help recipients keep vital programs running and reimagine how international development might work.
But few of those efforts have managed to attract the kind of philanthropic funding that the DIV Fund has. Funders, previous grantees and DIV Fund staff gathered in the glass-walled penthouse of a Washington think tank as the sun set Thursday to mark the new chapter. The mood was resolved and optimistic, having found a way to continue where many efforts in international development have been derailed.
“The loss of US government support is a huge blow,” said Michael Kremer, the DIV Fund’s scientific director and a Nobel prize winning economist. “It’s wonderful that private funders have stepped up to help try to fill part of that gap but it’s only filling part of the gap.”
Some of the leaders of the new nonprofit were also involved in directing $110 million from private philanthropy in the past year to projects that lost funding from USAID. Now, the DIV Fund aims to grant out $25 million annually, which represents a little more than half of DIV’s budget at USAID.
Their fundraising success has a couple of ingredients.
First, the nonprofit DIV Fund acts like a research and development hub to identify very affordable and efficient interventions and then to support their expansion to scale. As such, their budget is very small compared to programs that treat or prevent HIV or respond to famine, for example.
Then, while they were a division at USAID, DIV had already won outside philanthropic funding, including a $45 million grant from Coefficient Giving, a San Francisco-based foundation that is now one of the nonprofit’s anchor funders. The other funder is anonymous.
Finally, Kremer said the programs they identify generally get funding from local governments or earn revenue, rather than depending on long term funding from donor countries like the U.S. That path to sustainability is even more important in the face