It’s February 2026, and by now, we’ve all heard it more times than we can count. Bilateral foreign assistance is slowing down, and the aid sector is looking for other players to fill the gap. Increasingly, that’s meant turning toward foundations — a group of funders that spent $12.5 billion on development in 2023, according to the latest data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, revealing the world's largest foundations.

So, we took a closer look: Who spent the most on global development, and what does that mean for a sector that the aid world is relying on more than ever before?

The World's Largest Foundations: Who's Picking Up the Tab?

For those that follow the philanthropic space, the answer is no surprise. In 2023, the Gates Foundation spent $5.47 billion on development projects across the world. That made the foundation the largest philanthropic donor on the planet, two years before Bill Gates, the organization’s cofounder, announced he would be giving away nearly all his personal wealth — a whopping $200 billion — over the next two decades.

“2025 may be and is likely to be the first year of this century [that] preventable child mortality actually rises rather than declines. Where we see an increase in preventable deaths, in HIV, tuberculosis and malaria,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman in a press briefing centered on that announcement, which took place in May of 2025. “And so we want to do everything we can to offset that.”

Next up was the Mastercard Foundation, the philanthropic group linked to the American payment card service Mastercard Inc. The organization spent $1.27 billion on education and financial inclusion in 2023 — and one year later, its spending on programs alone reached nearly $1.7 billion.

Both the Gates and Mastercard foundations’ spending illustrates a larger trend throughout the sector: From 2022 to 2023, philanthropic donors increased their spending on development by 8%, while the world's 10 largest groups elevated their giving by 16.4%, roughly twice the sector’s overall growth rate.

Read the full article about the world's largest foundations by Elissa Miolene at Devex.