Over the course of 2024–2025, almost all the major concessional funds are seeking to raise a record $100 billion through fundraising efforts termed “replenishments.” But these funds depend on a small group of donors to deliver, increasing competition for finite resources at a time of constrained budgets. This has set up what we term a replenishment “traffic jam.”
The fundraising pile-up is further exacerbated by the international community’s tendency to create new funds whenever new challenges arise. There has been a proliferation in recent years, including the Loss and Damage Fund, the Pandemic Fund, and the Livable Planet Fund. And the World Health Organization will host its first-ever “investment round,” a de facto replenishment event as part of a new funding model.
The creation of new funds, each with significant financing requirements, forces donors to make more difficult prioritization decisions. The result has been duplication, fragmentation, and perennial funding gaps.
A potential path forward for these funds, given rising needs and constrained budgets, is for donors to take a more organized view of the concessional funding system and to devote more of their official development assistance (ODA) to multilateral funds.
Conversely, for many donors, the gulf between their contributions and funds’ needs is deepening. Since 2010, the core multilateral share of ODA has been in decline. In cases where multilateral aid has risen, it is usually earmarked multilateral aid for the UN system and humanitarian assistance, not development.
This interactive dataset shows donor pledges and contributions to the 13 major funds, spanning concessional multilateral development bank (MDB) funds, health funds, and climate funds, going back to 2000. We hope you’ll explore trends including how different donors prioritize different organizations over time and how some funds have been more successful than others at diversifying their funding base both in terms of new donors and financial engineering.
Contents:
1. Breaking down historical contributions to the concessional funds
Across the board, the same donors tend to dominate all the major funds. The United States is the largest donor and a dominant player in global health financing.
Most of the largest donors, especially the US, Germany, Japan, and EU institutions, give the majority of their aid bilaterally rather than multilaterally. China is not included as data is not available.
Overall, the proportion of ODA going to multilaterals is up slightly between 2010 and 2022. However, this trend is driven by a rise in earmarked multilateral ODA; core multilateral ODA declined among top donors from around 23 percent in 2010 to around 18 percent in 2022.
One of the most significant trends in the multilateral space is the rise of thematic vertical funds. Over the past twenty years, the share of donor pledges going to MDB concessional funds has dropped from over 75 percent to under 50 percent. Meanwhile, health funds have nearly doubled their share of total pledges, and climate funds have more than tripled their share over the same period.
2. Exploring past replenishments
To understand how the current traffic jam emerged, we turn to the past, tracking the evolution of the system amid the emergence of new funds.
The concessional finance landscape was historically dominated by multi-purpose development funds focused on poverty reduction, but new health funds emerged starting in the early 2000s, and the 2010s saw the addition of several climate funds. The past two years alone have seen a proliferation of new funds: the Pandemic Fund, the Loss and Damage Fund, the Child Nutrition Fund, and the World Bank’s Livable Planet Fund, to name a few.
The increase in the number and size of replenishments in any one cycle is clear in this chart, which shows a dot at the start of each replenishment cycle sized to the total volume of pledges, for the last 25 years (for which we have data). Funds such as IDA have had consistently large replenishments for the last 20 years but have stagnated in size, while others such as the Global Fund, have continued to grow.
This next section provides a comprehensive record of historical replenishments for these funds. This is an interactive chart so you can use the dropdown menu in the graph below to see charts for the 13 multilateral concessional funds with donor pledge/contribution data across each replenishment cycle dating back to 2000 (or for as far back as fund data allows). Funding sources are categorized by the top 10 donors with all smaller donors grouped together for each replenishment cycle. For the global health funds, the pledge/contribution data is further disaggregated into public and private donors.
The chart above shows annualized pledges by evenly dividing the total pledge of each donor by the length of each fund’s replenishment cycle, to facilitate comparisons across funds with replenishment cycles of different lengths and schedules (e.g., Gavi’s five-year cycle and the Global Fund’s three-year cycle). It also adjusts for different replenishment cycle lengths within a single fund, such as IDA’s 2-year replenishment in 2020–2021, versus its normal 3-year replenishment schedule.
This tree map shows pledges to the 13 funds grouped into MDB concessional, health, and climate categories for each funds’ most recent replenishment. Clicking on a fund shows the breakdown of donors by size of pledge, while the dropdown menu allows you to filter the chart to see a specific country’s distribution of pledges across these funds and categories.
There are notable differences in focus between countries: for instance, the US is among the largest health donors, while China gives more than 95 percent of its pledges to MDB concessional funds, mainly IDA.
Many of the MDB concessional funds—which provide grants and loans—have been able to significantly leverage donor grants. Most notably, in the last IDA replenishment, donor pledges only accounted for a quarter of the overall replenishment, with loan reflows, market borrowing, and other internal sources of funding making up the remainder. In contrast to the MDB concessional funds (IDA, AfDF, and ADF), the health funds and most of the climate funds (with some exceptions), rely on grants, operating on a “cash-in, cash-out model.” In general, the MDB concessional funds leverage much more than health and climate funds.
3. Tracking the 2024–2025 replenishment traffic jam
IDA, Gavi, WHO, and the Pandemic Fund are currently undergoing replenishments. The charts below track pledges to date towards these funds’ replenishment targets. Stay tuned as we continue updating these charts to reflect new pledges over the coming months.
Pledges from donors for upcoming replenishments are rolling in. The Pandemic Fund and Gavi have already made considerable progress, primarily from pledges from the United States. Denmark recently announced its IDA pledge, which was over 40 percent above its previous contribution. However, it is still early days, and most pledging will occur at upcoming pledging conferences or fundraising events hosted by each of these institutions.
To download the data and a set of methodological footnotes, click here (zip file download).
This sets of visualizations is a living project, and will be updated as new information becomes available. We believe the data is as accurate as possible, but if you believe we have missed anything or if you have access to additional information on historical or current pledges, please contact us at [email protected].
