Since our founding in 2021, Unlock Aid has delivered for the social innovator community, influencing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. federal spending for global development and creating new pathways to scale the most effective solutions in global development.
Since late-2021, that's how much we've helped to unlock in public resources for social innovators. That's money that pays for verifiable results, promotes sustainable economic growth, and leverages innovation to solve the world's hardest problems – all delivered to organizations and innovators embedded within the communities they serve.
Working through independent committees of experts, we identify 90 pacesetting organizations spanning sectors including global health, food security, education, nutrition, and infrastructure that are redefining the future of global development. We published these organizations as part of a Solutions Index and helped to connect them with major philanthropies, governments, and multilateral funding institutions. Many of these organizations have gone on to secure tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from those organizations. Visit SolutionsIndex.org.
We take innovators selected during early editions of the Solutions Index on the road to meet policymakers at the UN General Assembly in New York, with ministries of health and U.S. embassies in Kampala, Uganda; Kigali, Rwanda; and Nairobi, Kenya, and in Washington, DC, giving decision makers insights into new approaches that are more cost-effective and financially-sustainable than traditional methods, especially in sectors like global health and food security. Those roundtables led to the development of new funds totaling hundreds of millions of dollars and direct relationships between innovators, government, and philanthropy.
The State Department announced its new approach to U.S. global health, including areas we’ve long called for: country-to-country agreements, leveraging innovation, and prioritizing financial sustainability. One of the State Department’s first major announcements was a $150 million pay-for-results partnership to modernize health supply chains across five African countries, serving 130 million people. Despite our concerns about backsliding in global health progress generally, these markers of progress were not a given just months ago when the very question of whether these investments would exist was an open question.
By mid-2025, the narrative about the future of global development starts to shift. A New York Times opinion piece argued that foreign aid as it existed is over and calls for more cost-effective, financially sustainable, and locally-driven models, citing Unlock Aid’s work. The Global Prosperity Institute wrote, “Unlock Aid has done more thinking than most about Day Zero for the aid world,” drawing parallels between our work and what U.S. policy groups now call the “abundance agenda.”
As policymakers started considering the future of U.S. foreign aid, we launched ReimagineAid.org – an effort that brought together more than 20 experts and 600 participants to rank-vote 30+ proposals to modernize U.S. international investing. We used these results to update our broader policy agenda to influence proposals at the State Department and on Capitol Hill.
We launched a campaign to increase pressure on the U.S. Congress and Trump Administration to release $14B in already-approved health funds by paying for results to locally-endorsed, frontline solutions. We ran targeted ads across 14 key states, placed a full-page ad in the Miami Herald, and mobilized thousands of phone calls to lawmakers. We also published an illustrative RFP showing how the State Department could stand up a $1B Pay-for-Results Health Fund to deploy funding.
When the Trump Administration froze foreign aid in early 2025, thousands of frontline organizations around the world suddenly found themselves cut off from the resources they needed to deliver life-saving work. In response, we launched the Foreign Aid Bridge Fund to provide immediate assistance to high-impact, frontline organizations affected by cuts within just a few weeks while larger emergency funds were still taking shape.
In October, we published Glassdoor for Primes, a first-ever industry report outlining the business practices of 26 of the largest for-profit contractors, international nonprofits, and UN agencies in global development. This report has already helped to shape the business practices of many of the aid industry's biggest players. Click here to read the report.
In October, Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) announced their plans to introduce bipartisan legislation to "transform" global development. Their legislation would represent a sea change in the way the United States invests globally, fixing many of the issues that have historically inhibited U.S. agencies from having a bigger and more sustainable impact, especially to promote sustainable economic growth, leverage investments in innovation, pay for results instead of activities, and center country- and community-led development models. Click here to learn more about this bipartisan effort.
U.S. Senate lawmakers passed a spending bill that was packed full of good news (and funding) for social innovators. Specifically, it: creates a "scale up" fund to bring-to-scale the most effective solutions in global development; includes a big funding increase for the Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) unit within USAID; fixes procurement rules to make it easier for non-traditional organizations to work with the U.S. government for the first time; establishes minimum standards of cost-effectiveness for large USAID programs; and provides more funding for offices and programs with a strong track record of working with local organizations, social innovators, and the private sector, and in innovation-enabling sectors like digital infrastructure. Click here to read more.
This law includes many provisions the Unlock Aid community fought for, including provisions to shift funding to local partners, scale funding for proven innovations, change the way the U.S. invests in global health supply chains, and crack down on aid industry players that take advantage of smaller organizations and local communities.
We published a microsite to show there’s not much ‘foreign’ about foreign aid. Most of it gets channeled to a handful of aid industry insiders. Worse, aid industry practices can often cause more harm than good, including by displacing local markets and causing brain drain.
The White House announced a “fundamentally rewrite” of federal grant rules to make it easier for community organizations and others to access federal dollars.
If the U.S. could transform its approach to global development, what would it do differently? That’s the question we asked more than 200 leaders from the diaspora, business, investment, faith, social enterprise, and humanitarian communities, both in the United States and around the world, as part of a 6-month listening tour. In February 2024, we produced this report summarizing the recommendations we heard. Lawmakers have since taken an interest and are now translating these ideas into legislative text.
Major media starts writing about the need to reform U.S. foreign aid. Columnist Matt Yglesias reviews Unlock Aid’s "recipe for doing good better." Other publications like Vox and The Economist write about Unlock Aid’s campaign for reform.
USAID is issuing its largest-ever set of contracts, a $17 billion suite of awards for global health supply chains. Rather than doubling-down on a status quo model that is not working, USAID can instead use these contracts to show that a new way to invest in global development is possible. We published what a different model can look like.
Along with other coalitions like NEAR, CIVICUS, and the Project on Government Oversight, Unlock Aid leads a campaign to pressure USAID to embrace transparency and crack down on its biggest contractors that take advantage of local organizations. More than 100 organizations and coalitions that collectively represent more than 15,000 groups from around the world sign our joint letter to USAID Administrator Samantha Power.
In December, Congress invited Unlock Aid to testify about how to modernize the U.S. approach to global development. We published our 2023 policy platform, sourcing inputs from more than 100 innovators.
In Partnership with the Federation of American Scientists’ Day One Project, we convened 70+ of the world’s leading global development organizations in Mexico City to create a “Sustainable Development Goals Moonshot Accelerator.” Together, we identified big ideas – “moonshots” – that public institutions could champion to achieve the SDGs by 2030. We asked leading innovators, “If you had $500 million, how would you spend it?”
Unlock Aid published Three Asks for USAID focused on increasing the use of milestone-based pay for results, scaling up innovation, and diversifying USAID’s partner base.
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We brought dozens of our coalition partners to Capitol Hill to introduce lawmakers to the ‘doers’ and leading social innovators on the front lines of global development. Congress asked: What’s the most ambitious reform agenda you could imagine to change the way the U.S. invests in the world?
Organizations that participated in our research project pooled their resources and decided to do something about the problems that we identified. You can read the letter we sent to USAID Administrator Samantha Power to announce Unlock Aid. Politico wrote out our arrival.
Unlock Aid started by interviewing 70+ organizations to identify the biggest barriers that kept them from working with the public sector to have a bigger impact. We our initial findings in a report and a summary in Foreign Policy. U.S. Senator Tim Kaine cited them during a hearing.
