The Third Wave of American Philanthropy in Africa
$5bn a year of new philanthropic capital may soon be coming to Sub-Saharan Africa
Billions of dollars of new philanthropic capital may soon flow towards Africa.
Nan Ransohoff’s recent article “The third wave of American philanthropy” highlights the impending wave of new philanthropy as a result of the rapid growth of Anthropic and OpenAI. She suggests we may see roughly another $50bn of annual philanthropic spending from the US.
I think it’s plausible that 10% of that money, ~$5bn a year, ends up going to projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly doubling total private philanthropy into the region.
In this first piece I look at the scale of this new funding, why so much of it is likely to go to Africa, how it relates to what has gone before and the call to action that it represents.
In part 2, I’ll outline where I think this money can most effectively be deployed. So make sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss it!
Money, Money, Money
Where’s all this money coming from?
Nan’s estimate is based on the total existing assets committed to philanthropy of the OpenAI Foundation (which owns 26% of OpenAI), Anthropic’s co-founders (who own 12-18% of Anthropic) and Anthropic’s employees:
“~$370B in total philanthropic assets using today’s OAI and Anthropic valuations:
OpenAI Foundation: Current valuation of $850B * 26% = ~$220B total.
Anthropic founders: 7 co-founders have a combined ~12-18% of the company, and have pledged 80% of their wealth. So $900B current valuation * 13% * 80% = ~$90B total.
Anthropic employees: Anthropic has an aggressive philanthropic matching program. This source estimates $20-$40B in employee DAFs based on a $350B valuation, which has since increased to $900B. Let’s be conservative and call it ~$60B total.
Let’s imagine everyone would like to spend ~10% per year, assuming they can find great things to spend it on. So, $370B * 10%= $37B per year.
Why 10%? Foundations payout on average 5-9% per year. DAFs payout on average 20-25% per year. So, 10% is pretty conservative by these numbers”
Nan predicts $37B–$100B in new philanthropic funding as a result of this.
It’s possible that the above estimate is too high, as valuations could go down, accessing liquidity can be slow, and philanthropic spending takes time (and many of the people working at AI labs are quite busy at the moment for obvious reasons).
On the other hand, it also undercounts various other new sources of philanthropic funding:
The wealth of OpenAI employees and employees at other firms (e.g. SpaceX)
The new wealth of philanthropically minded investors: e.g. Coefficient Giving through Dustin Moskovitz holds $3-9bn in Anthropic stock and former Skype founder Jaan Tallinn owns $2-6bn. Both are members of Founders Pledge.
Bumper earnings at quant trading firms such as Jane Street, which made net trading revenues of $10bn in 2023, $20bn in 2024, and a whopping $40bn in 2025. This results in huge payouts to their teams, many of whom are committed philanthropists.
Either way, it’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of new philanthropic money on the way, but is any of it going to end up in Africa?
Why would any of it end up in Africa?
Many of the people at Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street and elsewhere hold personal views influenced by Effective Altruism, Progress Studies and similar frameworks for doing good in the world.
For those who are not familiar, a one-sentence summary of Effective Altruism would be something like “Using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”
Effective Altruists’ key focus areas tend to be on AI safety, other existential risks (such as pandemics and nuclear war), animal welfare and global development, while those of a Progress Studies bent might focus more on frontier technology and government reform in the United States.
There’s no time to go into all of these areas, but the logic for why these people end up focusing on global development is relatively simple: If all humans are of equal moral worth, you can do far more good per dollar spent by focusing on helping someone in extreme poverty than by helping someone who is already wealthy.
Back in 2021, roughly 44% of Effective Altruism funding was going towards global health and development work. That relative share has likely fallen as greater emphasis has been placed on AI safety and other focus areas, so it might be more like 30% now.
But what we really need to know is what proportion of those at Anthropic, OpenAI, Jane Street, etc. are interested in funding global development work (whether through Effective Altruism or otherwise).
All 7 Anthropic co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth to good causes. Of those, two have publicly signed the Giving What We Can pledge (an EA organisation that directs 60+% of its donations to global development), one is married to the former President of Coefficient Giving (an EA Fund that directs 30+% to global development), and the other co-founders are rumoured to be sympathetic to effective altruism, though this is not public knowledge.
Much of the senior team at Anthropic is likely to reflect the attitudes of management. Meanwhile, the OpenAI Foundation is no longer led by EAs (since the Sam Altman saga in 2023) but their literature does focus on “benefitting all humanity” and they are very likely to have an interest in global development.
With that, let’s try and estimate the rough scale of the resources that are likely to be directed towards Africa.
Let’s assume 50% of new wealth-holders are interested in global development, and those people direct 30% of their donations towards it, then we end up with 15% of the total pie going towards global development.
15% of $50bn, gets us to $7.5bn going towards global development in general.
And if you’re someone who cares about taking effective steps to improve the quality of life of the world’s poorest people, then you’re inevitably going to end up focusing most of your resources on Africa. Rapid economic growth in East and South Asia over the last few decades has lifted most of their population out of extreme poverty. This means that extreme poverty is increasingly limited only to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is therefore likely to be the focus of most of this philanthropy.
So, if you assume Sub-Saharan Africa is the focus of two thirds of that global development work, you get an influx of $5bn a year.
This would equate to roughly 10% of this new wave of AI-driven philanthropic spending. It would also nearly double total philanthropy into Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Third Wave of American Philanthropy in Africa
How does this new wave of American philanthropy fit in with what has gone before?
Nan identifies three waves of American philanthropy, each of which has also had its own distinct contribution in Africa:
Wave 1: Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and others led the way with money from industrial ventures in the late 19th century.
The very first work any of these entities did in Africa was Rockefeller Foundation’s “West African Yellow Fever Commission” formed in 1925. Through centres in Nigeria and Ghana, they managed to isolate the disease, ship it back to Rockefeller labs in New York and eventually produce the world’s first scalable yellow fever vaccine in 1937, of which 850m doses have since been distributed globally. For anyone who owns one of those pesky yellow booklets, you know who to thank!
Rockefeller Foundation’s other crowning achievement was the Green Revolution. Its work on crop research, including setting up Nigeria’s IITA, is credited with averting hundreds of millions of deaths from famine.
However, (as the chart showed) the absolute scale of private philanthropy from the US to Sub-Saharan Africa - led by Rockefeller and Ford foundations - was relatively small throughout the 20th century.
Wave 2: Gates and other 2000s billionaires primarily made their money from software and computers from the 90s onwards.
Launched in 2000, the Gates Foundation has spent upwards of $40bn in Sub-Saharan Africa, roughly three times the entire total of American philanthropy in the region in the 20th century. Most of that money has gone to global health, aiming to tackle AIDS, TB, malaria, polio and other diseases, and the Foundation claims to have contributed to saving 82m lives (primarily in Africa and South Asia). They have certainly played an important role in the huge improvements in life expectancy seen in Africa since the 1990s.
The Gates Foundation’s biggest impact, though, may actually be its approach to how philanthropy is done. It approached the work with a rigour and focus on cost-effectiveness that had been missing from much of existing development work, and helped to catalyse new organisations that then scaled up with government funding.
For example, Gates seeded Gavi and the Global Fund as well as pioneering advance market commitments, getting a pneumonia vaccine to poor countries years earlier than the market would have.
It’s important to remember that philanthropy is dwarfed by government overseas development assistance, and that all foreign aid is in turn dwarfed by the size of African government budgets and domestic economies.
In 2020, foreign philanthropy in Sub-Saharan Africa was ~$5bn, government overseas development assistance was ~$68bn, and spending by Sub-Saharan African governments was ~$430bn.
The best philanthropy takes advantage of its greater flexibility relative to institutional funding to ensure it has a catalytic effect.
These days, some might object that Gates and others have become too bureaucratic and institutional. Or, that they should’ve focused more on economic growth (which has at times been strong since the 90s, but still not fast enough) to durably lift people out of poverty.
Whatever his failings though, there’s a plausible case that Bill Gates has done more good than any private citizen alive today, and possibly any person.
Wave 3: The new wave of AI money.
That brings us to the third wave, a potential $5bn a year of new philanthropic funding that could flow into Africa.
It’s hard to guess exactly what approach this new wave of philanthropists might take, but I’d like to offer four stylised claims about how they are likely to approach global development:
They are likely to think AI is a transformative technology and to expect a very fast timeline for AI take-off.
They are likely to recognise the power of the private sector to create wealth
They are (mostly) unlikely to have deep experience/knowledge of low-income countries
Those who are familiar with Effective Altruism are likely to understand the huge range in cost-effectiveness between different global health interventions and the importance of thinking rigorously about impact.
If you’re an equity-holder in a frontier AI lab reading this, then I hope you are in equal parts inspired by Bill Gates’ example and motivated to be even more effective. In the next article I’ll make my modest contribution to the discussion on how you ought to direct your money to achieve this.
What can you do (if you’re not about to become a billionaire)?
This new wave of funding is a huge opportunity for anyone wishing to have a major impact in global development.
Of course, any funding is important, but the advent of a new wave of funding is a unique opportunity to innovate and build new organisations in global development.
With the collapse in government aid budgets in the US, UK and Europe, there is plenty of capacity to absorb funding. However, as the above chart shows, while much of that aid money was spent on highly-effective programmes, much of it was also spent on very ineffective programmes.
There might be opportunities to relaunch effective organisations like DIV Fund, which has recently risen from the ashes of USAID.
But this is also the time for talented people in Africa, in the diaspora and others to build a new highly-effective organisation to mobilise this funding.
In order for this money to be put to good use, someone needs to help it actually flow and not stay locked up in donor-advised funds in the US. These would-be philanthropists will be enormously busy and finding high-quality global development organisations to back is likely to slip down their priority list.
So, if you have the privilege of access to Silicon Valley elites, and can bridge the gap to effective global development work, then consider launching a fund, advisory, or some other vehicle to help direct this money. Renaissance Philanthropy is a great example of an organisation that is building new funds, and (hopefully) here at Africa Jobs Fund we’re an example of a great new fund.
At GiveWell’s current cost-effectiveness of $5,000 per life saved, $5bn a year over 20 years ($100bn) could save around 20 million lives.
If you’re reading this in Africa, in Silicon Valley, or elsewhere, make it your mission to ensure that we do even better than that.
In part two, I’ll be digging into where we think this new funding out to go. Make sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss it!
If Wave 1 and Wave 2 channeled funds through Global North grant makers, why can't Wave 3 evolve to scout for grantmakers closest to the problem on the continent? I'm waiting for Philanthropy Circuit to publish my take on this by the end of the month.
Why is the developing world still so obsessed with aid rather than trade and investment?
The history of aid is very clear. From the Marshall Plan to other post-war reconstruction efforts, aid was never designed to be permanent. It was meant to be temporary, catalytic, and transitional - a bridge toward recovery, productivity, trade, and investment. Yet in much of today’s development discourse, aid is often framed as if it is a permanent pillar of development rather than a short-term instrument.
This framing is problematic. Aid is demeaning when it reduces countries to perpetual recipients rather than economic actors with productive capacity, markets, assets, and investment potential. It can also distort public finance through fungibility, dependency, fragmented budgeting, distorted incentives etc. At both the individual and national levels, permanent reliance on aid undermines the very agency that development is supposed to strengthen.
The development community needs to read history more seriously - in every field they work in and in every phenomenon they write about.