From fighting Ebola and neglected tropical diseases, to improving literacy and numeracy rates, supporting anti-slavery efforts, and strengthening civil society, Legatum has built its reputation on a pioneering style of philanthropy that pools funds collaboratively and tracks impact like a return on an investment.

Over the course of the last decade, its flagship initiatives - the END Fund, the Freedom Fund, and the Luminos Fund - have mobilised more than US$1bn to improve health, education and economic outcomes for millions around the world, stamping out disease, helping people at risk of exploitation, and getting out-of-school kids back into the classroom.

Although initially conceptualised and anchored by Legatum, these three funds have gone on to catalyse donations from major philanthropic players – including the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, the Mohamed Bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, UNICEF, and UK Aid – establishing a new strategic blueprint for collaborative giving.

Other investments have included The Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (now the Kuo Sharper Center); Geneva Global, a philanthropy advisory; the Prosperity Institute, (formerly the Legatum Institute); and $14m for social enterprises and civil society organisations in China over a span of 15 years.

Now in 2025, as government aid budgets are being slashed while humanitarian needs soar, Legatum has announced a new fund, which may just be its boldest move yet: the Resilio Fund. Designed to channel micro-grants to frontline organisations in crisis zones, the Resilio Fund is seeking to disrupt what Legatum calls a ‘dysfunctional, top-down aid system’ that can sideline local actors and create dependency.

One of the governing principles of Legatum’s philanthropy is to “serve people, not save them”, explained Guy Cave, President of the Legatum Foundation.

This notion is at the very core of the Resilio Fund, which during a four-year incubation, provided more than 1,000 micro-grants to grassroots NGOs in Sudan, Myanmar, Somalia, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and the Philippines, in many cases reaching entities cut-off from regular aid channels.

From mending wells and clearing roads to distributing seeds and tools, Resilio’s micro-grants helped restore essential and economic services, allowing communities to repair and rebuild amid conflict and natural disasters.

“We’re deploying a hyper-localisation approach,” said Cave. “We look at what communities are already doing for themselves and then fund them directly. This helps them to build their capacity and resilience to future shocks.”

How did a Dubai-based investment company that so few people have heard of become such a big player in the global philanthropy ecosystem moving millions of dollars in the fields of health, education, social development and humanitarian aid?

The story begins back in the mid-noughties. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has just won an historic third term and George W Bush is also back for a second run in the White House. Oil prices are volatile on the back of the US-led invasion of Iraq, emerging markets are booming, and the global financial crash is yet to happen.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as it was known then, had not long begun operations and it was slowly introducing the language of business into the giving space. But overall, the ecosystem was still dominated by traditional philanthropic powerhouses such as the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

With a few exceptions, giving was typically top-down, with the bulk of grants going to established NGOs, universities, and cultural institutions.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and campaigns for debt relief dominated the development agenda, and government aid funding was increasing year-on-year, in part due to post 9/11 security agendas.

It was 2006 when New Zealand businessman Christopher Chandler wound up Sovereign Global, the investment firm he ran with his brother out of Monaco, to create Legatum, headquartered in Dubai, and set out on a mission to do more philanthropy. 

From the outset, he sought to apply investment best practice to his philanthropic initiatives, measuring output (which he viewed as returns) as carefully as inputs. But instead of channelling large sums to big organisations like most of his peers were doing at that time, Chandler wanted to test the thesis that philanthropic capital can (and should) be deployed to frontline organisations, even in fragile and conflict-affected regions.

It was not long after Legatum had been founded that McCormick, sitting in the firm’s first HQ in Concorde Tower, DIFC, came across an article in the Financial Times about Bill Gates. But it wasn’t the Microsoft founder’s words that caught McCormick’s attention, it was the parasitologist quoted alongside him.

In the piece, Dr Alan Fenwick had explained that neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) - easily preventable parasitic and viral infections that blind and maim, keeping children out of school, adults out of work, and communities trapped in poverty - could be tackled at scale for not a lot of money.

Piqued by the notion Legatum could achieve an outsized impact for a modest investment, McCormick phoned Fenwick to find out more, and a few days later the businessman found himself on a plane from Dubai to London for a meeting that would prove to be transformational on many levels.

“It was a hot and sticky Friday afternoon in London,” McCormick recalled. “From the airport, I took a train into Paddington and made my way to Imperial College where I found Fenwick in this airless room, full of maps laid out on tables.”

Those maps, whose creation had been funded by the Gates Foundation, showed the prevalence of NTDs across Africa. Fenwick outlined what was then a relatively new strategy known as mass drug administration (MDA) - the bundling of interventions to make delivery more efficient and reduce NTD caseloads – and gave a cost estimate to do it at scale.

“When he told me we could treat people and stop transmission for as little as 50 cents per person, it was a no-brainer,” McCormick says. “We’d already been working in Burundi and Rwanda, so we committed US$10 million to test Fenwick’s theory in those two countries.”

Legatum had been doing its philanthropy via Geneva Global, the advisory firm set up by Sovereign some years earlier to administer its social investments.

Based in Paoli, Philadelphia, its team of advisors – among them a young Guy Cave, who’d joined after running humanitarian projects for Save the Children International in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East – had for some time began deploying small grants in sub-Saharan Africa to community-based education and health programmes.

Inspired by the possibilities to end suffering for millions of the world’s poorest people, Geneva Global designed a response funded by Legatum to bring together doctors, pharmaceutical companies, delivery organisations, local communities, government health departments and schools. They would use the existing maps to ensure comprehensive drug delivery across Rwanda and Burundi, relieving suffering and breaking chains of transmission.

As a result of these pilot programmes, 9.7 million people were treated in just four years and in Burundi, prevalence of schistosomiasis (bilharzia), an infection caused by a parasitic worm, was reduced from 12 percent in 2007 to 1.4 percent in 2012.

Inspired by these results and what more they might be able to achieve, Legatum came to a decision in 2012 to create a standalone philanthropic vehicle solely focussed on tackling NTDs.

The legalities of the END Fund were still being finalised when a chance meeting in a Rwandan hotel lobby between McCormick and Bill Campbell, at that time an emerging philanthropist, led to the former JP Morgan banker coming on board as founding chairman.

“We had no team at this point,” recalls McCormick. “But Bill took a real bet on what was then little more than an ill-formed idea… and soon he was on the phone to the Gates Foundation, who in turn came in with US$2m. Suddenly the fly wheel was turning.”

Ellen Agler joined the END Fund as founding CEO some months later and soon catapulted the organisation into the spotlight when she convinced Legatum to raise funds to replace USAID money that had been pulled out of an NTD programme in Mali following a coup.

It was a timely example of how agile private philanthropy could be, compared to the bureaucratic processes involved with government aid allocations.

“Mali really gave us momentum and people became drawn to what we were doing,” remarked McCormick, who said donors were also inspired by the way the END Fund, unusual for a philanthropy at that time, opted to work closely with governments and community organisations so as to effect change at a system level that would outlive traditional short-term grant cycles.

As the END Fund took shape, waking up the public health community to new ways of working, behind the scenes, Geneva Global* was continuing to deliver small grants to support frontline organisations, many of which were involved in combatting modern slavery.

Partnerships were created, for example, with local NGOs in India, Nepal, and Pakistan to dismantle systems of debt bondage in brick kilns and agriculture. They also backed community-based liberation and rehabilitation programmes and legal advocacy groups in West Africa and Latin America.

Sticking to the thesis that funding grassroots organisations is a better way to solve problems and create enduring solutions, Legatum provided grants for some 40 NGOs working in the sector over a period of four years. Results were positive, but piecemeal.

“It’s a messy space,” McCormick said. “Actors compete for funding, so collaboration is rare. When we crunched the numbers, we found we were the leading funder of these small NGOs—despite spending just a few million dollars a year. We thought that was appalling.”

So, as they had for NTDs, Legatum decided in 2014 that it should create a vehicle to tackle modern slavery and support those caught up in its web, which it did - this time in partnership with two other philanthropies: Walk Free Foundation, an anti-slavery organisation created by Australian mining magnate and philanthropist Andrew Forrest and his family, and Humanity United, the advocacy-focussed philanthropy of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam.

* Geneva Global was acquired in 2019 by Global Impact and continues to run as a philanthropy advisory independent of Legatum.

Like its predecessors, Legatum’s next philanthropic vehicle, the Luminos Fund, was also incubated through a series of pilot programmes steered by Geneva Global, but this time in partnership with the Strømme Foundation, a Norwegian NGO, supporting children in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso through its Speed Schools initiative.

An education programme providing a second chance for children who have dropped out of education, Speed Schools combined child-centred, activity-based pedagogy to bring out-of-class learners back up to speed, with holistic support such as school meals and training for families to understand the importance of education.

Keen to scale the model, Legatum began working in Ethiopia, where in 2010 an estimated 60 percent of primary-age children were out of school. Early results were encouraging, and so they created the Luminos Fund, appointing Caitlin Baron as its CEO.

Baron, who had been based in South Africa with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, has an indelible memory of an early visit to a school in rural Ethiopia to see the pilot in progress.

“We travelled out a long way into what really felt like the back of beyond, well beyond the reach of a cell phone signal or electricity grid, until we came to this tiny classroom with mud walls and a tin roof,” she recalled. “The only source of light inside was what came from the door but in the room was an array of hand-made learning materials and a set of children joyfully engaging with each other.”

Baron says she “fell in love on the spot” and a decade later, remains at the helm of Luminos, which is still working in Ethiopia, but also in Ghana, Lebanon, Liberia, and The Gambia.

Earlier this year, Baron published The Luminos Method, a practical guide for educators, policymakers, and changemakers to help children learn—even in the most challenging circumstances – drawing on findings from 10 years of programming.

And there is plenty of data to share. Not only does Luminos run a real-time dashboard to track the progress of all its learners, but it has also commissioned more than 30 randomised control trials.

Among them is one that in 2022 found Luminos students in Liberia could read four times as many words per minute and complete two times as many addition and subtraction problems as children in control communities.

To-date, Luminos has given nearly 400,000 vulnerable and out-of-school children a second chance at learning. Overall, Luminos students are twice as likely to complete primary school than their peers. Meanwhile, three quarters of those who do the Second Chance programme are still in mainstream classrooms after 12 months.

A longitudinal study published in 2017 by the University of Sussex, looking at Luminos’s impacts in Ethiopia, also revealed extraordinary results.

Tracking the progress of 625 Second Chance graduates who had transitioned to public schooling after Luminos’ intervention (and comparing them against a control group of 1,250 government school students), the study found that Second Chance children completed primary school at twice the rate of government students.

Meanwhile, 75 percent of Second Chance children were still in formal school after six years, compared to 63 percent of government students. Second Chance children also outperformed government students by an average of 10percent across Maths, English, and the local language (Sidama), and had higher aspirations for their academic and employment futures than their peers.

Luminos is looking to expand to a new geography next year, Baron said, using its well-tested model of curriculum and pedagogical development, bolstered by training for teachers and support for government education departments to embed good practice into national systems. “If you can learn to read, you can read to learn,” noted Cave. “These interventions compound over time and transform a child’s life trajectory”.

Legatum’s success with Luminos has enabled it to pile in additional donors, including Cartier Philanthropy, the LEGO Foundation, the Mulago Foundation, and many more besides.

Tom Hall, the CEO of the UBS Optimus Foundation Network, which has donated to four of Legatum’s funds, said the firm’s collaborative approach “strengthened effectiveness by fostering coordination, reducing fragmentation and duplication of effort, and maintaining a clear focus on delivering meaningful results.”

And he noted that Legatum had recently invested in the senior share class of UBS’s SDG Outcomes Fund, which earlier this year, reached its subscription target of US$100m delivering results-based financing for a range of health, education, environmental and employment interventions in Africa.

“There’s been a lot of talk about collaborative philanthropy in recent years, but Legatum’s been at this for decades,” Baron observed. “They’ve truly been trailblazers in this space, and I don’t think they get enough credit for the success they’ve had.”

The dozens of published studies evaluating Legatum’s philanthropy point to the delivery of transformational change for the people and organisations they are supporting. But this notion of transformation is just as important for Legatum’s leadership and its funding partners.

“We are very data driven and do like spreadsheets, and that is linked to discipline, which is important, but actually, the deeper magic comes from going out and seeing the work and engaging with it emotionally, and so we organise regular field trips and learning visits,” McCormick explained.

“Life should be a journey of transformation, not accumulation,” noted McCormick. “If I want my heart transformed, I need to be generous and engage in the care and love of other people.”

The END Fund’s former CEO, Ellen Agler, commends Legatum’s awareness of the transformational power of philanthropy, and notes how it has used that to successful build deep relationships with its donors.

“If you can bring philanthropists on a journey and create a community around giving, it leads to collaboration beyond strategy,” she noted. “It’s about deep, soul-connected love and people sharing their highest aspirations for themselves, their children, and this planet. To have created that sense of collective is a beautiful thing.” - PA