Small Firm Cuts Big Deals to Fight Global Problems

Legatum Foundation

This article is one of a series The Chronicle is featuring this month about leaders who are pushing unorthodox ideas to give philanthropy more power to do good.

Doug Balfour runs Geneva Global, a philanthropic consultancy outside Philadelphia. It’s small, with just 50 employees, but it’s been at the center of a fight to stamp out diseases in Africa. And a $100 million bid to end human slavery. And a multimillion-dollar effort to educate children in developing countries.

That’s because Mr. Balfour and Geneva have developed expertise assembling an unusual philanthropic tool: funds in which foundations and high-net-worth individuals pool donations to tackle a problem. It’s not a new idea — the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has been raising such funds for youth-development work since the late 2000s — but Geneva is giving the idea a Wall Street shine, with a results-obsessed focus and donor reports that would make Goldman Sachs proud.

According to Mr. Balfour, donors are jumping in who’ve never shown interest in international development. “The model is so much more attractive to a businesslike investor,” he says. “This is about big results, and it really fits the philanthrocapitalist profile. That type of person is saying, ‘I want to make a difference, and I want to make a difference in my lifetime.’ "

Geneva came to this idea around 2010, after several years managing programs to treat 9 million people in Rwanda and Burundi for parasitic and bacterial illnesses known as neglected tropical diseases. The conditions are treatable — drugs are available — but they don’t get the attention of diseases such as malaria, in part because they mostly affect poor, marginalized communities that lack clean water and adequate sanitation.

Geneva’s client was the philanthropic arm of the Legatum Group, an investment firm founded by New Zealand billionaire Christopher Chandler. Legatum had wanted to test the effectiveness of administering drugs to entire regions of people and targeting not just one disease (as has been done with malaria and other illnesses) but many.

Rates of diseases such as trachoma and schistosomiasis fell dramatically, all for just a few pennies per person. “We were just gobsmacked by the fact that this was such an amazing philanthropic buy,” Mr. Balfour says.

At the urging of Legatum, Mr. Balfour began putting together the blueprint for a fund — END Fund, as it became known — that would pay for similar efforts across Africa. The Gates Foundation joined as a partner. The Margaret A. Cargill Foundation and the Helmsley Trust, among others, joined later. Bill Campbell, a senior adviser at JPMorgan Chase, is chairman of the fund, and African telecommunications magnate Strive Masiyiwa and his wife, Tsitsi, are backers.

Today, END Fund is among the largest financial backers of the fight against neglected tropical diseases. It has funded treatment of more than 85 million people in 22 countries.

Geneva went on to establish the Freedom Fund, which is raising $100 million to fight human slavery, and the Speed School Fund, which backs accelerated learning programs for refugee children and others without access to school. Such work has become so well-regarded that major grant makers in international development are hiring Geneva to set up END Fund-like entities tailored to their projects, Mr. Balfour says.

A key to all these funds is to treat donors like investors, he says. “They see all the accounts; everything’s totally transparent. These are people that put $5 or $10 million into this endeavor, and they know where their money’s going.”

Corrections: Due to information provided by END Fund, this story originally reported incorrectly that the END Fund is the third-largest financial backer of neglected tropical diseases.

Also, the caption in the previous version misidentifed the program Mr. Balfour was visiting.