Devex

With governments pulling back from development finance, impact investors are eyeing new markets and models — but the capital gap remains far beyond what private money can cover. When aid plummeted last year, the development landscape started looking everywhere for funds: Europe, Asia, the Gulf, philanthropies, and impact investing. But no individual donor or industry looked able to fill the gap left by the drastic cuts.

Turkey’s pre-COP31 finance summit may sidestep the stalled public finance debate, focusing on instruments and national priorities instead. The Turkish presidency of the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference is holding a climate finance summit this week in Istanbul in the lead-up to COP31.

Immigration hard-liner Andrew Veprek takes over leadership of the foreign assistance bureau at the U.S. State Department. Plus, closing out Food for Peace programs, and DFC’s accountability problem. Andrew Veprek is now in charge of the U.S. State Department’s foreign assistance bureau. The immigration hard-liner has criticized “forever aid” and pushed an “America First” approach. Now aid groups are watching to see whether less money makes it out the door.

“While staff have lived with this uncertainty for months, our beneficiaries have not," said a staff member with one of the affected aid initiatives. "We now face difficult conversations with people who placed their trust in us." The U.S. State Department will be spending up to $150 million to close out the few remaining awards it had kept within the Food for Peace program, America’s flagship hunger initiative.

The Africa Jobs Fund is betting on export manufacturing and international migration to raise worker incomes. Plus, AGOA gets another lease on life. Africa faces an enormous jobs challenge. By 2050, a quarter of the world’s working-age population will live on the continent. But economies aren’t creating nearly enough formal jobs to keep pace.

Calculating global health funding cuts under Trump, and how AI might improve sexual and reproductive health. Can the WHO Foundation afford to keep itself running? The foundation was created to raise funds for the World Health Organization, including from the private sector, while serving as something of a firewall against any undue influence on the agency.

For the latest episode of our podcast series, Devex Business Editor David Ainsworth sits down with reporters Sara Jerving and Elissa Miolene to discuss the top global development stories of the week. Listen to "The fight over $7.5B in expiring aid and a rejected State Department grant" on Spreaker. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, YouTube, or search “Devex” in your favorite podcast app.

Over the years, the foundation has increasingly relied on one major donor, the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation. But the funder tells Devex its support runs through 2026. The WHO Foundation, which was created to raise additional funding for the World Health Organization, could be at risk of running out of money itself. The foundation has ramped up its fundraising over the past two years and is expected to transfer over $100 million to the U.N. agency from 2026-2030 with over $42 million slated for 2026.

Across Africa, young people are turning to AI chatbots for private answers to sensitive health questions. But accuracy, privacy, and safeguarding remain concerns. When Purity has a question about sexual and reproductive health that she does not feel comfortable asking someone else, she can now turn to WhatsApp.

As Washington strips protections from over a million migrants, halted remittances and an influx of people are set to compound crises from Haiti to Somalia. For decades, temporary protected status has been used as a humanitarian safeguard for migrants in the United States, and a way for people to remain in America when war, disaster, or upheaval makes a return to their home countries impossible. Last year, some 1.3 million people were living with that status — TPS — across the country.