A $500 million fund to help tackle humanitarian crises has been launched by an investment partnership in Dubai.
Dubai-based Legatum on Wednesday announced it is aiming to raise $500 million for its Resilio Fund to develop “hyper-local” responses for those in need.
Legatum said it has already issued grants in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Somalia, Lebanon, India and the Philippines, while it is seeking to use its resources in Gaza and Syria.
It has not yet been announced where the fund will have its headquarters.
The launch comes, however, as global aid is under strain with counties cutting back on budgets.
“These aren't just funding gaps, they are human gaps,” said Badr Jafar, UAE special envoy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for business and philanthropy, at the formal launch of the fund at Dubai’s Museum of the Future, directly addressing these funding challenges.
“Classrooms not reopened, homes we not rebuilt and livelihoods not restored,” he said. Yet this is not a moment for despair.
“It's a moment for redesign. The question is no longer only how much we give but how we give, to whom and to what.”
He said the new fund represented a proven approach to crisis response and it demonstrated why local ownership is “faster, more dignified and more durable”.
“Now, why Dubai? Because the UAE is rapidly becoming a global nexus for philanthropic investment and collaboration.
“A place where entrepreneurs, philanthropists and humanitarian operators are building unusual alliances that deliver real world outcomes.”
Global aid budgets are under pressure to counter major crises around the world. The plight of refugees poses increasing challenges for host countries including Uganda, which is home to two million refugees.
There is also a need for an international response in Syria, where the civil war has left at least 16 million in need of humanitarian assistance.
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said last month that $45.3 billion was needed to fund life-saving initiatives this year, with only 21 per cent funded as of September. The $9.6 billion received marked a drop in funding of more than 40 per cent compared with the same time last year.
“We have been forced into a triage of human survival,” Tom Fletcher, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, said in June.
“The maths is cruel and the consequences are heartbreaking. Too many people will not get the support they need but we will save as many lives as we can with the resources we are given.”
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development also projected a 9 to 17 per cent drop in official development assistance in 2025. This comes on top of a nine per cent drop in 2024.
Need for action
The fund operates by dispensing microgrants ranging from $2,000 to $10,000. And these funds go to support first responders from communities that are typically at the front lines before external agencies can get in.
Projects funded during the pilot phase range from rebuilding homes to ensuring access to food banks.
Guy Cave, president of the Legatum Foundation, said the international “top down” humanitarian system has failed to support communities as they tackle disasters. The time has come to back community-led responses to crises and “that’s why we have founded the Resilio Fund”, he added.
The hyper local angle is not a new idea and does not seek to replace conventional aid but it operates independently.
“We have already piloted this intervention … and we found out that it's cheaper, it's faster and it allows us to reach communities that traditional aid can't reach as quickly,” Fanta Toure, chief executive of the fund, told The National.
“The idea of Resilio is to find the communities, find what they're already doing to support themselves and get behind it.”
Born in Ivory Coast, Ms Toure said she was “deeply disturbed” by the response to the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s and wanted to bring local voices into the conversation.
“I do not believe in charity,” she said. “I believe in aid and I think these two are very different things.
“I think charity comes with a principle that we're going to save people. We're doing them a favour. We know better than we do.”
But she said the approach she preferred was to support people to build their own future.
“We are doing that in a way that they will get the support they need to create a future that is better than the one that they are moving from.”
Malen Serato, Resilio partner in the Philippines, told The National how her country is affected by volcanoes, earthquakes and multiple typhoons a year.
“With that and the socioeconomic political situation in the Philippines, we are not disaster free. We are disaster guaranteed.”
And it is continuing. On Wednesday, Typhoon Kalmaegi had killed at least 85 people and caused heavy floods in central Philippines – an area still recovering from a major earthquake.
“People are still reeling from the effects of the earthquake and now here comes another strong typhoon and they are displaced once again,” she said.
Ms Serato, who has been working in the aid field for more than a decade, outlined how traditional aid replaces community action, makes people dependent and is often purely “transactional” but she said Resilio looks at it differently.
“We get to these meetings where we talk about how we support these community initiatives or mutual aid without killing it, without strangling it with paperwork, which traditionally aid usually does.”
She also spoke about how resilience, a common term in the aid world, is a “buzzword” but for people in disaster hit areas it is daily life.
“My dream is for the community to stop being resilient,” she said, speaking about the Philippines. “They are resilient people because they are just surviving blow after blow. They should thrive.”
Legatum said the fund had anchor commitments from four philanthropic institutions: the Vitol Foundation, UBS Optimus Foundation, the Irene M Staehelin Foundation, and the Quadrature Climate Foundation, with more to be announced.
Resilio is Legatum’s fourth collaborative philanthropic drive. Its previous initiatives – the END Fund, Freedom Fund and Luminos Fund – raised more than $1 billion and directly helped more than 500 million people worldwide, the group said.
