Mulago Foundation

The Mulago Foundation is a private foundation focused on high impact philanthropy: they fund high-impact organizations mostly through grants, sometimes with debt or equity. The foundation was originally envisioned by Rainer Arnhold, a San Francisco pediatrician and philanthropist, who taught at Mulago Hospital, Uganda. The foundation was officially created by his brother Henry Arnhold after Rainer Arnhold's death in 1993.

Criteria for funding organizations
The Foundation's stated goal is to identify and invest in the highest impact giving opportunities. On their "How we fund" page, they write that they are looking for three things: a priority problem, a scalable solution, and an organization that can deliver. Once they identify an organization they wish to fund through their fellowships, they provide unrestricted and continued funding. The Mulago Foundation does not currently accept or solicit proposals. The foundation itself tries to locate organizations to give to through their own network and referrals. The main way they start funding organizations is through their two Fellowship programs - the Rainer Arnhold Fellowship focused on poverty solutions and the Henry Arnhold Fellowship focused on climate solutions.

Organizations funded by Mulago
As of May 2024, the Mulago Foundation website listed about 80 organizations include Babban Gona, Blue Ventures, Bridges to Prosperity, Dost, Development Media International, Digital Green, Educate Girls, Food for Education, Foundation for Ecological Security, Friendship Bench, Global Forest Watch, Kheyti, Medha, Noora Health, One Acre Fund, Planet Indonesia, SaveLIFE Foundation, Ubongo Learning, Urgewald and Youth Impact.

Reception
Mulago's CEO Kevin Starr is a regular contributor to the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Charity evaluator GiveWell described the Mulago Foundation as an "impact-focused" grantmaker (alongside the Gates Foundation, Skoll Foundation, Children's Investment Fund Foundation, Jasmine Social Investments, and Peery Foundation). GiveWell stated in 2011 that it would consider the list of Mulago Foundation grantees (along with those of the other impact-focused grantmakers listed above, as well as the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation) as part of its list of charities to review to see if they qualified for GiveWell's highest ratings.

The Mulago Foundation was also mentioned on the Tactical Philanthropy blog, and Kevin Starr of Mulago wrote a guest post for the blog.

Kevin Starr of Mulago wrote an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review describing Mulago's definition of impact and some of the subtleties associated with the concept. His piece was referenced on the Acumen Fund blog.

On March 11, 2014, Kevin Starr and Laura Hattendorf of the Mulago Foundation wrote a lengthy article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review skeptical of cash transfer charity GiveDirectly's accomplishment so far, saying that the evidence so far was underwhelming, though there might still be bigger gains a few years down the line. They contrasted GiveDirectly with other charities that they felt delivered more bang for the buck: One Acre Fund, VisionSpring, KickStart International, and Proximity Designs. Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell wrote a lengthy response countering that GiveDirectly's impact had been more rigorously established, and that Starr and Hattendorf were using flawed metrics to judge impact. The GiveDirectly board independently published a response on the GiveDirectly blog.

Similar resources

 * Acumen Fund
 * Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
 * Good Ventures
 * Jasmine Social Investments
 * Omidyar Network
 * Peery Foundation
 * Skoll Foundation
 * Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation