CGD Podcast: Philanthropy’s Evolving Role in Global Development with Katrina Sill

Erin Collinson: Welcome to the CGD Podcast. I'm Erin Collinson, director of our recently relaunched US Development Policy Program and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Today, we're talking about the role of philanthropy in global development, how it's evolving amid shrinking aid budgets, new funding models, and shifting global priorities. In many cases, philanthropic capital is being asked to do more, to move faster, take greater risks, and fill gaps being left by governments and multilateral institutions. Joining me today is Katrina Sill, the Global Health and Development Lead at Founders Pledge, an initiative that helps facilitate high-impact philanthropic giving from entrepreneurs. Before we jump in, I should mention that Founders Pledge is one of CGD's funders, but this episode is an independent conversation about philanthropy's evolving role in development and is not tied to any specific funding activity.

Katrina recently helped launch Founders Pledge's new Catalytic Impact Fund, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about its objectives and how philanthropic funders are rethinking their role amid big shifts in global development. Katrina, thanks so much for joining me today. To start off, I wonder if you can give our listeners a quick rundown on Founders Pledge and share a bit about the portfolio you lead there?

Katrina Sill: Thank you, Erin. I think you gave a fantastic rundown just there, saying that Founders Pledge exists to help facilitate high-impact philanthropic giving. We researched the world's most pressing problems so we can empower donors to do immense good with their giving. I actually work in our research team, which focuses on identifying and evaluating those high-impact funding opportunities across really a multitude of cause areas. We have more than 2,000 members to date, and these are largely startup founders and entrepreneurs who have now collectively pledged more than 11.5 billion to charity, and they have actually already donated 1.5 billion to the charitable sector over the last 10 years. My team, in particular, the Global Health and Development team, is investing a lot of time in this Catalytic Impact Fund that you mentioned. Basically, at the moment, we're accepting donations from both our members, but also other donors and partners who want to support the highest impact work in global health and development, but maybe they don't know where to start, or they're really excited about the catalytic strategy of building for a transformed future of global health and development.

Erin Collinson: I think it's very safe to say the development sector has gone through some major changes. It's great to hear from a philanthropic standpoint, at least Founders Pledge. Those are really impressive figures, and it's a very positive trajectory with a number of the sort of largest donors. The US, European countries have signaled these plans in many cases to scale back their investments in aid, at least aid supporting development, humanitarian response. I know that amid all of those big changes earlier this year, Founders Pledge was involved in an effort to respond to sort of urgent needs fueled in part by those disruptions.

Can you tell us more about how those changes landed with you and how Founders Pledge responded?

Katrina Sill: Yes, absolutely. I happened to actually be in Tanzania just after the US stop-work order came through, and I remember I was walking through a market, I think it was a couple of weeks after. For me, this still felt like more of a headline than reality. A woman came up to me, just a stranger, guessing I was American, and she just came up and asked how she was going to get her antiretrovirals for her HIV. This obviously never happened to me in the past. I lived in East Africa for five years, and nothing like this had ever happened. This is a major shift that we had not seen before, at least in my career in the space. That funding uncertainty became much more real. This wasn't just a line on a budget. It's really life or death for many vulnerable populations. I felt really grateful to be in an ecosystem that includes, of course, the Center for Global Development, that was excited and eager to take action and see this disruption as both opportunities to move forward. At Founders Pledge, we moved forward in two specific ways. The first was very immediate. We started this rapid response fund, which was targeting the more immediate urgent effort to save programs that were the most critical to save and improve lives that were now at risk.

The second was this restrategizing around our funds, and specifically the Catalytic Impact Fund, to answer the longer-term question of how do we build for a resilient and durable world that is less prone to these precarious situations where our lives are left quite suddenly at risk. I'm sure we'll speak more about that. The Rapid Response Fund, as you asked, yes, it was our immediate effort in collaboration with a couple of organizations, and we ended up mobilizing over 13 million in just six months, which was deeply motivating for me as an individual to see just how much people care about these lives.

It ended up projecting to save more than 4,000 children's lives alone and more than that in total lives. I don't know if anyone else listening felt some hopelessness in what we can do going forward, but I certainly did and felt really motivated to see how the ecosystem of actors working in low and middle-income countries really came together to generally collaborate, but to deeply listen as well to what was happening in these contexts. We were specifically working with The Life You Can Save and Project Resource Optimization, which I believe you've spoken with on the podcast as well, PRO.

Both were excellent partners to identify what programs are A, the most critical, the most cost-effective, and which are truly at risk because the situation is still continually evolving. PRO is doing an excellent job of reaching out to the programs to get the context week to week to understand what was happening and where support was most needed. The collaboration allowed us to mobilize resources and also communicate real up to date situations to donors. That was the second thing that really motivated me, seeing how people responded with such deep care to the lives that were at risk in the sudden gap.

A unique situation where you could save a life for less than $1,000, which is wild when you think about it. One of the grants went to Helen Keller International for malnutrition treatment in Nigeria, and donors really stepped up. We did not expect this level of response, and it was deeply inspirational to me to see that. Now we're taking that forward into this Catalytic Impact Fund. We made a total of 13 grants from that rapid response fund to 11 partners. The last of these grants was actually a bridge grant. I think it nicely illustrates both the importance of the immediate response with the longer-term building of durable systems and an improved future.

That was to Clinton Health Access Initiative or CHAI technical support units, which were particularly focused on empowering and supporting 10 sub-Saharan African governments as they made changes to their budgets in response to the cuts in their Ministry of Health, where more than 10% of their budgets were cut as a result of the frozen funds. If you can imagine, every dollar from those Ministry of Health has potential to save lives, and so to cut 10% is quite a frightening concept.

CHAI has been supporting them to analyze where their budget was previously allocated and find efficiencies where they can integrate services that were previously through aid, and to look for ways that they can reprioritize the budgets to the most cost-effective and life-saving interventions. This is the kind of thing that we're looking for now to start moving from that immediate, rapid response fund, urgent gap filling into this longer-term building for the future to prevent this kind of thing from being as risky long term.

Erin Collinson: I think that uncertainty that you mentioned really was something that all of us were captivated by and trying to think about how we can prevent this circumstance from happening again. As you noted, I think it sounds like it was a really great partnership on all sides that you were able to build amid this challenging time. We at CGD were incredibly lucky and felt really pleased about the opportunity to host Project Resource Optimization, PRO, that you mentioned.

For our listeners who maybe haven't checked it out already, we did post a podcast back at the beginning of June where I spoke with two members from that team, Caitlin Tuck and Rob Rosenbaum, about their work and the effort that went into that and how they were able to guide some other donors into the space of identifying these urgent and vetted projects. Really looking at how do you identify the most cost-effective interventions and plug the holes where possible, though still a small slice of the pie in terms of what was happening prior. I want to pivot a little. Clearly, you have been thinking a lot about how this private giving can complement or even reshape traditional development finance with the Catalytic Impact Fund. It sounds like it's designed to do just that, and help philanthropic capital move easier and faster into spaces that might otherwise be overlooked. How did you think about the objectives and priorities of the fund when you were starting out?

Katrina Sill: We have this prevention treatment analogy. This principle guiding the Catalytic Impact Fund is to really focus on that prevention aspect. Trying to target the high-leverage, timely opportunities where a modest grant can trigger systemic improvements or remove key bottlenecks in the long term. In other words, we're trying to do more than provide temporary relief. We're investing in a portfolio with the goal of transforming the future of global health and development.

Erin Collinson: I love the immune system analogy, particularly given how much you're working in global health. That feels really apt. It sounds like the current aid and policy environment helped inform your approach, but you're also careful to recognize that you can't chase headlines, but that things you can do to really advance progress and maybe address some of these precarity issues that came up would be things that are really of high value and worth thinking about. Has the emphasis of the new fund changed the way you identify investments?

Have you employed a more proactive approach to scouting opportunities? Maybe you can also share if there is a standard timeframe or amount invested, any regional preferences when it comes to recipients?

Katrina Sill: We are increasingly proactive in our research and our grant making with this question in mind of how do we build and improve future? We need to identify what are the most powerful levers to allow for that, where there is the greatest risk or opportunity, particularly where there hasn't been focus already. We're very lucky to have the full flexibility to consider anything. We are not limited by sectors, by geography, by timeframe, by type of delivery of the intervention, which is extremely rare, even as a funder.

It's also very challenging, I'll be honest. We are asking research questions like, what will help the billions of people who now depend on small holder farming not only to survive year to year, but instead to graduate longer term and to higher welfare brackets? What pathways will support low-income governments towards really achieving financial resilience? What are the causes of mortality that will increase in the future that are trending upwards rather than down, and how can we prevent that now?

These are the kinds of questions we're asking, informed, of course, by peer review research, but also by experts and implementers that are in development context. Based on those investigations that we're doing, we then proactively reach out to programs that are well-equipped to drive forward the most promising levers in the context, and hoping that we can identify these for driving that long-term change. What this means is that we don't have a regional focus because we are really, like I said, open to anything that can maximize the most good per dollar invested. We're starting with this position of impartiality.

We do believe that every person's life and well-being has equal moral value regardless of where they were born. Although we don't have a preference for specific context, in reality, we find that most of our grants end up going to programs that primarily focus on low and low income countries or potentially exclusively because there's the reality of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that a dollar creates infinitely more wellbeing for someone who is already living in extreme poverty than for someone who is living in a wealthy nation and comparatively has access to more services and income.

In a lower-income context, of course, a few dollars can restore a person's sight or protect a child from a fatal case of malaria when they're under five, or enable them to learn to read.

Whereas in a high-income country, it would be very challenging for a few dollars to achieve those kinds of outcomes. Instead, it might buy a cup of coffee, maybe for a few dollars. We do tend towards supporting lower-income contexts. In terms of our grant amounts, we have historically averaged around 100,000 to $300,000 per grant. Although as our funds are growing, fortunately, we are hoping to extend that into more the 1 to $3 million grant range.

We don't have a standard timeframe that we're looking at. We're really flexible to what we call expected value, so looking at how long in the future would we see benefits and modeling out basically, the uncertainty and the projected outcomes discounted based on that uncertainty for future value.

Erin Collinson: You mentioned operating in some more neglected spaces, and I think sometimes they're neglected because of information asymmetry. Sometimes they're just hard, which you've mentioned, also potentially high risk, so I wonder if you could say something about your risk appetite or interest in investments that may be at least highly uncertain.

Katrina Sill: That's such a great question. We are risk-neutral, meaning we are willing to fund both high-risk, high-reward bets as well as the more certain opportunities. Basically, we compare these on equal terms. I want to zoom out to just say that I'm really excited to see that this is even a question people are interested in talking about. I'm noticing an increasing focus on cost effectiveness, assessing where does a dollar go the furthest and how do we measure that from both implementers, researchers, funders.

I'm also noticing that this can be a drawback at times, particularly in the effective giving ecosystem. Many of the highest potential opportunities for impact may be neglected, like you said, because they are uncertain. The impact of the program may be uncertain or potentially hard to measure. I notice that the focus that many of us have on trying to hit the highest return for dollar invested, sometimes biases towards things that are the most certain or evidence-backed, where we have quite a lot of randomized control trials, for example, on a particular intervention, and so the projected value is quite certain.

I think the challenge here is that this can leave things that are challenging to measure, like we said, that are maybe challenging to randomize or to have a control group, as things that are just not considered. What we're looking at here is taking the best available evidence or cases and building models or simulations of the likely outcomes from that. This allows us to look at things like policy change or advocacy, which, when successful, could be truly transformational at a macro level.

Because we are risk-neutral, we can look at those forecasts and compare something that might have more certain evidence versus something that we're using our best available logic and case studies, as well as available evidence, and compare those against each other, and we can then invest in what has the highest expected value. Of course, this means we need to take discounts for uncertainty where there is that challenge. It makes me excited that we are still able to value cost-effectiveness, but with more flexibility to assessing the possibilities of things that are challenging to measure and not deciding that we will not consider those because of the challenge.

Erin Collinson: I think it's important, obviously, to have that slightly broader aperture. I do find that a lot of the people, particularly when we talk about international assistance and things, the advocates of, let's pursue the interventions we know really work, tend to acknowledge that it's also important to leave room for that innovation and that we have to bring some humility to the exercise because we don't know everything that works all of the time, and so having the willingness to try new things, explore new territory is a really important thing, as long as you pair evaluation or you're tracking so you know what works in the end.

You've been talking about this with some enthusiasm, so clearly you're excited about this in general as an endeavor, but I wonder what makes you most excited about this new fund and new approach that you get to pursue?

Katrina Sill: I'm glad you can tell I am very excited about this. I think what makes me particularly excited is that there has been a disruption in the funding ecosystem with the shift in aid, not just in the US, but as you said, in European countries as well. I love the idea of seeing a challenge as an opportunity, and I think that that is what I am seeing here with this fund. I think that this is a really exciting time to rethink how and what philanthropy can do, and to start thinking about how solutions can provide that long-term change and address root challenges.

I think I've seen a lot of efforts in my career to make cost-effective change, but I often see that these changes are also stepwise, relatively small changes and short-term. I'm very excited to get the opportunity to ask ourselves the question of what would be truly game-changing. In fact, our team has been using that as one of our main filters, as we're looking across the many opportunities that could be very cost-effective. We're asking ourselves, like, "Okay, which of these would truly change the future? Which of these are game-changy?"

We sometimes say, I find that just deeply motivational to have the opportunity to even ask that and then to see ideas come to the surface where I do think there is that hope.

Erin Collinson: All right, so you put game change on the table. How do you think, then, about what it would mean to be successful in this work? What is going to change the game, and how would you know that you've succeeded, whether in the next five years or even over a longer time horizon?

Katrina Sill: The way we think about our success or our impact is our counterfactual impact. What would happen if we did not make this grant? How does that differ from our projections? Then, the reality of making that grant? That's informing how we decide on what we are investing in. It's also informing how we measure our success. We see a few key levers where we expect this impact to be coming from, to get a little bit more tangible in what catalytic can mean. The first is on improving systems. The second is on accelerating progress, particularly removing key bottlenecks.

The third is supporting and enabling new proofs of concept to develop the iteration and foundation they need to be able to then move towards the next best thing that can be scaled up. Maybe I'll share a few examples in there of what we're looking for in measuring success. The first that I mentioned was improving or transforming systems. Here we're looking-- Basically, we're asking ourselves the questions of did this investment truly improve or transform a system to effectively then improve lives in the long term? We're not asking just how many lives can this initial pilot save? We're asking can this grant permanently strengthen institutions and policies to save lives for decades? We're hoping, yes.

One of our recent grants, as I mentioned, was to the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which, as you mentioned, is a big actor in empowering governments, particularly in their health ministries. Here success would look like, and our grant to support CHAI. Success would be that they have empowered governments to build their in-house capacity, to analyze their own budgets and implement the improvements, to focus resources on the most effective programs, and to cut costs in areas where they could cut costs.

Here we'll be looking and following up for, basically, cases of where the government was able to integrate critical services, invest more in critical services like childhood immunization, or malaria prevention, and to find cost-saving efficiencies that can then sustain into future years. Now, this may not sound like the most exciting thing to everyone to analyze budgets and find cost-saving and reprioritize budget lines.

What this means is that if you can move even 1% of a budget as large as a Ministry of Health budget towards something more effective, you can save thousands of lives per year, and that budget line is likely to stick around into future years. You're now seeing that life-saving potential year upon year and less vulnerability to future cuts as well. This is what we're hoping to see for that kind of systems change success. The second that I mentioned was around accelerating progress or removing bottlenecks. Again, I realize this can sound vague, so maybe I'll give an example of what success could look like here.

Another one of our recent grants was to address antimicrobial resistance. Some of your listeners may know that this is causing estimated one million preventable deaths a year and growing in low and middle-income countries, which, when I first heard this, it felt like a sneaky and surprising challenge. Also, quite frightening. We know that there are market failures happening here and policy barriers where newer, more essential drugs, and particularly antibiotics, are not reaching low and middle-income countries.

We have just processed a grant to an organization called Armor, which is funding them to identify opportunities to remove those barriers. They are doing initial research on what are those barriers and where are there reasonable levers to remove those. Success in this kind of grant, that's intending to remove bottlenecks and accelerate progress, would be identifying even one idea that could accelerate access to even one drug. We estimate that would save thousands of lives per year as well. These are the kinds of big bets that, even if there's a small amount of success, we estimate just exponential growth in lifesaving potential.

I'll share one other example on the funding proof of concept success. This one also can be a bit vague and also very high potential. I'll mention that there are many organizations out there who are innovating on what could improve the future for low and middle-income countries in particular. One of those is the Lead Exposure Elimination Project or LEEP. This is an organization that advocates to improve lead paint regulations in low and middle-income countries, which is a known risk for children's cognitive capabilities.

Now, we gave them flexible funding when they were just getting started, and they are wonderfully growing to be a major international organization that has proven their model in multiple countries and has attracted substantially more funding. We are looking for things like this that where we could find and launch the next LEEP. New organizations that could really disrupt the status quo of things like policy or regulation to improve future generations' wellbeing, ideally, globally, not just in one country. You can see that we are putting a lot of emphasis on long-term impact, and we do a lot of quantitative heavy analysis as well.

We're aiming for cost-effectiveness targets that are 15 times the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers, which is a challenging bar to meet. You can see from these examples that we're also looking at the qualitative examples of interventions that could, based on case studies and forecasts, be game changers into the future. We're willing to fund well-evidenced interventions to scale up as well as bold ideas that might be more uncertain. Hoping that with a portfolio of these things, that some of them will pan out, and that over the next five years, we expect to then see very high returns across the portfolio as a whole.

Erin Collinson: There's also the question of accountability in philanthropy. Public aid comes with scrutiny and reporting requirements that private giving often doesn't. I wonder if you want to say anything about how you think the sector should approach transparency and learning without losing the flexibility that makes it so valuable.

Katrina Sill: I'm glad you asked this because prior to joining Founders Pledge, I actually worked in a team at Innovations for Poverty Action that really focused on this question of how can we support funders to also manage their own modern evaluation and learning and to hold themselves accountable. It's a bit of a novel question, to be honest, because there is no one holding funders accountable. I'm grateful that you're now turning this around at me after spending part of my career on asking funders that question.

I think the ideal is that funders they've made their grants based on a clear analysis of what their own priorities are in terms of the outcomes they're trying to optimize for, and which grants could help to drive that forward, and that through that process, they are then following up to support the implementers to share back what they have learned so that the funders can then iterate on their own strategies and support the next step that will optimize even further.

Sometimes that means implementers will learn their initial plans were needed to be iterated on halfway through the grant. I think funders have a role of empowering that iteration rather than sticking to an initial plan and then supporting whether there's a decision after that to move to the next stage or not. I think trust is really important for implementers to feel comfortable sharing how things are going and where they would like to pivot next.

I think that that trust should go both ways, that funders can also be honest about what they're prioritizing and why, and how they're assessing different opportunities against each other, so that if a funder chooses to go with another opportunity, they can communicate back what that partner might want to consider in the future. That partner can decide if those are similar considerations for them and something that they want to take into account to improve their own programming going forward, or if they're prioritizing different things.

I think that transparency needs to go both directions. In terms of the accountability to the funders' results, I think that the ideal is that we are reflecting backwards on which of our projections for how grants would go came forward, and how does that compare to how we are forecasting for our next grant, so we can continue to learn and iterate on our own research evaluation of grants and report that back transparently. At Founders Pledge, I think that that is happening increasingly so. Our researchers are tracking forecasts for every evaluation we do.

We then have clear outputs or early outcomes that we're following up on to assess. We might have said, "Okay, there's a 20% chance that, let's say, one of the countries that the Clinton Health Access Initiative will make a big change in their budget." Maybe I'll follow up and ask how many of those countries had case studies to indicate there was a change made, and we would mark that as correct if it matched our forecast. We actually track our researchers' forecasting capabilities. We're trying to hold ourselves accountable in that way. I think what we're improving on in the next year is finding ways to integrate that into our upcoming grants. How can we use the learning that our partners are experiencing to inform how our strategy should shift for our grant-making in the next cycle? How can we make sure to reflect and improve based on what our partners are learning? I think in the next year, we'll be improving that internal learning agenda.

Erin Collinson: I agree with you, too, in terms of the relationship between funders and recipients. I think just that open communication ends up being so important. Stepping back, should we see a sizable reduction in official development assistance that a number of people have predicted? How would you hope that philanthropic donors, not necessarily just Founders Pledge, respond? Do you think they'll step up? What do you see as the biggest limitations and opportunities?

Katrina Sill: That is a great question. I think first, we need to start with a bit of an uncomfortable truth, which is that philanthropic capital is just unlikely to ever fully replace the total amount of official development assistance or aid at scale. Then we need to ask ourselves this question of, "Where do we have comparative advantage to make the most impact in this landscape?" For us, that's the question of, "Okay, how can we have an outsized impact for every dollar we're investing?" That's where we want to target our funding.

For us, we're seeing that as opportunities where you can fund potentially something that, for example, government won't be able to fund because it's higher risk or there's not yet a proof of concept, like we said, or that maybe it has a longer time horizon before a result will be clear. Philanthropic funding can provide that sort of seed capital and that initial investment. That's where we're seeing a lot of potential. Of course, that's not exclusive. There are opportunities for philanthropic funding to support scale-up, which is also very critical, but we're seeing a unique window in that higher risk, proof of concept, longer time horizon, higher uncertainty opportunities for philanthropy.

Erin Collinson: When you think about this role of philanthropy over the next 5 or 10 years, what would good look like for the sector more broadly?

Katrina Sill: I would say that philanthropic capital has a unique opportunity to support also private sector to take ownership of aspects that could improve well-being long-term as well. I think that there are opportunities for donors to support maybe riskier endeavors that the private sector or social enterprises could step in later on.

Erin Collinson: We ask our podcast guests a couple of sort of standard questions. The first is, if you could wave a magic wand and change any policy in the world, what change would do the most good?

Katrina Sill: I love that question. Despite working in global health and development, I would actually say the lowest-hanging fruit here would probably be ending factory farming. As many of us are aware, there's extreme suffering for the billions of animals that are in intensive factory farming today, and it would be very much within our control to end that. This feels like a pretty easy win and very tractable. The benefit is that it would also help humans because it can reduce the pandemic risk, of course, and the need for antibiotic exposure of those animals.

Founders Pledge does actually have a focus on farmed animal welfare and animal welfare as well, so this is something that we are also looking at supporting longer term.

Erin Collinson: Okay. The second one is, can you share a memorable story from your work?

Katrina Sill: There are many, but I think the funniest ones are the failures. I'll share [chuckles] a good one about being wrong. When I was back in Tanzania, much, much earlier on back in 2015, I had just moved for a new job, and I was testing out solutions for a program that supported smallholder farmers. I came in having just read the literature on what could support rural households and learned all about the risks from smoke inhalation and cooking indoors. I had this brilliant motivation to roll out improved cookstoves. I was very confident this would be well-received because it reduces the need for firewood.

Like I said, it avoids smoke inhalation, and it improves the speed of cooking. I thought, "Of course, why wouldn't people want this?" We launched the trial. Fortunately, it was a trial because nothing happened. Farmers did not want these cookstoves. It just was not what they were excited about. They were not asking for this. It was a great check on my own assumptions and a good reminder to have humility for a context that I'm not deeply familiar with. Fortunately, killing that program was actually quite fun because it freed up our budget and our team to pivot.

Eventually, I should say it was honestly over, probably, a period of years, we learned to better listen to the desire for farmers to have long-term assets and livelihood sources, and ended up running trials on high-value tree seedlings. Most specifically and most excitingly, avocado was very popular, and the uptake was really immediate. It was much more motivating to roll this out than my brilliant idea of improved cookstoves. Those trees are now producing fruit. This was a really powerful lesson for me that attachment to ideas can actually prevent much bigger impact.

It can be really challenging to let go of an initial idea. Pulling the plug on that is what allows you to find a good one. All of this does really give me a lot of empathy for the many organizations out there that are needing to pivot every day and the importance of allowing for that iteration continually.

Erin Collinson: For listeners who are eager to follow along with your work and the Catalytic Impact Fund, or have suggestions for opportunities [chuckles] that you might be interested in, where can they learn more? You mentioned, obviously, the work you're doing to track and follow along with the impact that you're having. Where might they find more information about these investments?

Katrina Sill: If you just search Founders Pledge and go to our Global Health and Development Work or our Catalytic Impact Fund website, you'll find updates there on our strategy, our reporting, our most recent grants. We are not currently seeking reactive ideas for new funding opportunities. That may change in the future, so please do check back. We're actually going to consider if that could be useful in early 2026. Do check back then, we may open that up again.

We will also make sure to be reporting back annually on how the fund is going, that kind of step back reflection on our own accountability, like we were saying, and how important that is. We're eager to follow through on what we are learning and share that with the public more transparently as well.

Erin Collinson: Great. Thanks again. This was a really interesting conversation. I enjoyed learning about the Catalytic Impact Fund, and there are some terms that get thrown around. I think catalytic is increasingly one of them. How are you thinking about the ways in which your investments can accelerate progress in meaningful ways in the development space, especially amid so much turmoil and when we've been having to grapple with real uncertainty? I appreciate also all of your reflections on the role of philanthropy in a challenging policy context and about where we go from here, how we track impact, how we think about risk, and the importance of bringing humility to maybe all of these questions.

Katrina Sill: Thank you, Erin. I think these were some of the most fun questions that I've been asked in an interview. I'm grateful for the opportunity to go deeper on some of these things, and eager to see what comes out next, also from your podcast.

Erin Collinson: Yes, absolutely. Check out more about the Catalytic Impact Fund on Founders Pledge's website. You can check out more of CGD's work on cgdev.org.

Thanks again for tuning in.