The phone calls started almost immediately. It was February 2025, and USAID's sudden closure had left hundreds of health clinics, water projects, and nutrition programs in a kind of bureaucratic freefall. Sasha Gallant, a former USAID staffer, remembers the urgency: organizations that had relied on federal dollars for years were now scrambling, their pipelines abruptly severed.
What happened next was less a master plan than an improvisation born of necessity. Gallant and three colleagues—Caitlin Tulloch, Robert Rosenbaum, and Grace Morgan—cobbled together what they called Project Resource Optimization, or PRO. The concept was deceptively simple: build a vetting system to identify the most evidence-backed programs at risk, publish them on a public list, and introduce them to private donors willing to step in. No overhead. No bureaucracy. Just triage.
As of August 5, 2026, PRO had funneled more than $140 million to over 90 projects across 37 countries, touching an estimated 42 million lives. It's an improbable figure for such a lean operation—LinkedIn pegs the team at somewhere between two and ten employees. And it raises a question that philanthropy veterans are watching closely: can private capital, deployed quickly and with discipline, actually substitute for the withdrawal of billions in government aid? Or is this a stopgap that only underscores the scale of what's been lost?
Triage by Spreadsheet
PRO didn't invent the idea of evidence-based giving, but it did something unusual: it treated cost-effectiveness as an emergency response tool. The team started by combing through USAID obligation data, identifying programs with strong track records and measurable outcomes. They conducted expert interviews. They built a methodology that prioritized interventions not just for impact, but for delivery feasibility—could the work continue if a donor wrote a check tomorrow?
The result was what they called an "Urgent & Vetted" list. Projects were presented in modular chunks: $450,000 for maternal health services in Haiti, reaching 35,000 people. $198,000 for mobile health teams in Chad, serving 15,000 over six months. Donors could see exactly what their money would buy, and implementing organizations—many of them veterans of USAID contracting—knew how to deliver.
Initially housed at the Center for Global Development, PRO later migrated to the DIV Fund, an independent nonprofit spun out of USAID's Development Innovation Ventures. By September 2025, just six months in, the platform had mobilized $110 million for roughly 81 projects affecting an estimated 41 million people in more than 30 countries. CGD announced the milestone that fall, noting it represented full 12-month funding for the first wave of interventions. The projected benefits were specific, almost granular: safe water for 250,000 people, malnutrition treatment for 1.35 million, basic health services for 35 million or more.
Whether those projections held up on the ground is harder to verify—PRO publishes outcomes data selectively, and the model relies heavily on implementing partners' own estimates. But the speed was undeniable.
Where the Money Went
The portfolio skews heavily toward WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene), nutrition, and maternal and child health—sectors where cost-per-life-saved metrics are well established and donor appetite runs high.
Some of the commitments were substantial. Catholic Relief Services secured $4.6 million to keep emergency health, nutrition, and food assistance running across 11 facilities in Sudan's Darfur region, with an expected reach of 328,140 people. In Gaza, Project HOPE landed $3.5 million for primary health care and WASH services across multiple governorates, targeting roughly 151,700 people. In Ethiopia, Population Services International raised $925,000 to finish eight partially built village water systems in Tigray and Oromia—construction that had stalled mid-project when USAID funding evaporated. The systems are expected to serve about 47,000 people and provide small-scale irrigation for over 4,000 farmers.
Other projects were smaller but no less urgent. Project Medishare's $450,000 for integrated maternal, newborn, and child health services in Haiti. ALIMA's $198,000 for mobile health and nutrition services in Chad. These are the kinds of programs that rarely make headlines but form the connective tissue of global health delivery—until they don't.
Institutional Backing, and a Bigger Question
PRO's approach has attracted more than individual donors. On January 22, 2026, GlobalGiving announced a collaboration that mobilized more than $7 million for cut programs. In May 2026, GiveWell—one of the most rigorous evaluators in the effective altruism space—committed $5 million to the DIV Fund specifically to support the discovery and scaling of water quality innovations over three years, with grants up to $1.5 million at the final stage.
That same month, a study in Science found that USAID's abrupt withdrawal was associated with a higher probability of conflict events in Africa. The implication was sobering: when aid infrastructure vanishes overnight, the cascade effects extend well beyond health outcomes. According to WHO figures cited in DIV Fund materials, 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and roughly 750,000 deaths per year are linked to unsafe water. Those numbers predate the USAID shutdown; what comes after is still being measured.
Other philanthropic players have also moved. In June 2026, ICONIQ Impact launched a $100 million Child Survival Portfolio, directing funds to 18 grantees across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia for nutrition, immunization, and frontline health. The announcement explicitly referenced a $12.7 billion USAID global funding withdrawal as context—an acknowledgment that private philanthropy, no matter how ambitious, is operating at a fraction of the scale it's trying to replace.
What Happens When the Stopgap Becomes the System?
PRO now operates under the DIV Fund, which itself relaunched in February 2026 with $48 million from two private donors (one identified as Coefficient Giving, the other anonymous). The Associated Press noted at the time that some of the same leaders who had directed $110 million through PRO were now steering the DIV Fund's independent operations—a kind of continuity that suggested the emergency phase was giving way to something more durable.
The team remains deliberately small. PRO doesn't implement programs; it vets them, publishes criteria, and makes introductions. Recent updates on LinkedIn highlight continued funding for emergency health and nutrition support in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, though the pace of new announcements has slowed somewhat from the frenetic early months.
Whether private capital can sustain this level of mobilization over the long term is the open question. PRO's $140 million-plus figure, displayed prominently on its website, doesn't carry a timestamp—so the rate of growth since the $110 million milestone in September 2025 is harder to pin down. What's clearer is that the platform has created a working prototype for evidence-based emergency giving, one that treats cost-effectiveness and transparency not as philanthropic nice-to-haves but as operational requirements.
For impact investors and social entrepreneurs tracking the global health funding landscape, PRO offers something like a stress test. It shows how quickly infrastructure can emerge when expertise is ready and the stakes are impossibly high. It also shows the limits. $140 million is real money. It's also a rounding error next to what USAID used to deploy—and a reminder that some gaps, once opened, may be too wide for private dollars alone to close.
