An anonymous Connecticut family gave Americares $50 million to plug part of the aid gap

A Connecticut family that will not be identified has given $50 million to the American aid group Americares, the largest single donation in the organisation's 47-year history, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.

The gift lands at an unusual moment. Most global health organisations have spent the past year and a half contracting. Americares is now planning to expand.

"They definitely understood the moment and wanted to do more to respond to that," Christine Squires, the president and chief executive of Americares, told AP of the donor. The family has been associated with the organisation for three decades and is, in her words, very savvy about global health.


Also read: MacKenzie Scott's $100 million donation helped wipe out $40 billion in medical debt—here’s how Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife's strategy works

Half the money will go toward the group's target of helping 100 million people access quality healthcare by 2030, largely by supplying medicines and equipment to its network of more than 4,000 health centres. The focus will be on under-funded countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Latin America. Americares also plans to increase support for health centres inside the United States, in states where it expects a rise in the number of residents without insurance. The other half goes into the endowment.

What was lost

Americares drew roughly 10% of its funding from the US government before the cuts, Squires told AP. The shortfall showed up as cancelled work.

A maternal care project in Tanzania lost its support last year. Medical clinics in Colombia serving Venezuelan migrants stayed open for several months on private money before closing. A planned five-year collaboration to build a more resilient medical supply chain across Gaza was scrapped entirely.

The organisation now funds itself entirely through individual donors, corporations and private foundations, which Squires said matters as it responds to more than 20 active emergencies, among them the Nepal floods and the Ebola outbreak in Congo.

Founded in 1979 and headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, Americares says it has delivered more than $17 billion in humanitarian aid across 164 countries.

The bigger hole

The gift is the latest in a series of private interventions since the Trump administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development in early 2025. The scale of what was withdrawn makes the arithmetic difficult. US foreign aid totalled about $64 billion in 2023, the most recent year with comprehensive figures.

Private money has moved, though unevenly. British hedge fund manager Chris Hohn stepped in to keep production running at MANA Nutrition, one of two American manufacturers of the therapeutic peanut paste used to treat severe child malnutrition, after US stop-work orders halted their lines. Hohn had already given the organisation more than $250 million before the crisis.

A group of former USAID staff, working outside office hours or after being fired, assembled a list of 80 high-impact programmes and took it to private donors. Their effort, Project Resource Optimization, mobilised more than $110 million in grants, with other emergency funds raising at least $15 million more, taking the total past $125 million within eight months.

In March 2025, Jacklyn and Miguel Bezos, the parents of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, committed up to $500 million to UNICEF's Child Nutrition Fund, structured as a one-to-one match designed to draw in other donors. It was, by UNICEF's own account, the largest investment the agency had ever received from a family. The Gates Foundation, separately, narrowed its priorities.

Susan Appe, an associate professor of public administration and policy at the University at Albany who researches how nonprofits handle shifting donor-country priorities, told AP that global health has drawn most of the large donors' attention, which she called reasonable given that lives are at stake. But she said the philanthropic response overall has been slower than researchers in her field expected.

"I think that a lot of philanthropy scholars like myself have been a bit disappointed with the lag of response," she told AP. "It's kind of, to some degree, business as usual."

Nobody involved argues that private giving can substitute for what was cut. A study published in The Lancet in June 2025, analysing data from 133 countries, estimated that USAID-supported programmes had prevented more than 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021, and projected that sustained cuts could result in over 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including more than 4.5 million children under five. The authors described the projection as a model output with a wide uncertainty range.

Also read: Bill Gates never studied at University of Washington, but it paid him $500 as a teen; 5 decades later, Microsoft co-founder is giving it $540 million

The Trump administration has defended the closure. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in July 2025 that the agency had little to show for itself since the end of the Cold War, and that the State Department would prioritise trade and investment over aid, negotiating directly with countries rather than through nonprofits and contractors.

Squires said she hopes the anonymous gift prompts others. A donation of that size signals that people still trust both her organisation and the humanitarian sector, she told AP.

"It's not only up to individuals," she said. "However, individuals who have the means, who have the passion and can invest like this, will help to bring others along."

(With inputs from AP)