The Money Isn't Missing. The Mechanisms Are.

What UNGA week 2026 revealed about absorptive capacity and the sector's favorite misdiagnosis

At a forum Devex hosted on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 24, Howard Buffett offered a glimpse of how his foundation may give away part of his father's fortune. The Associated Press reported that the foundation plans to take more risks and will need recipients "prepared to absorb $500 million donations at a time."[1]

That is one funder's description of his own giving plans, not proof of a sector-wide problem. Still, it points to a constraint on the receiving side: organizations able to take on and manage very large sums. In a period when aid cuts dominate the discussion, Buffett's comment raises a related question. Can the organizations expected to deliver the work handle capital at the scale funders want to provide?

I did not attend UNGA week or Devex Impact House this year. I reviewed Devex's coverage of its sessions, the AP's sideline reporting, and the official data. Together, they show how funders, investors, and nonprofit leaders describe the problem.

What the investors said

On Wednesday, a Devex Impact House session brought leaders from Acumen, the Rockefeller Foundation, GSG Impact and UNICEF USA together to discuss the future of impact investing. Jesse Chase-Lubitz covered the conversation for Devex.[2] The panel did not discuss Buffett's remarks, but several points spoke to the same question: how capital reaches organizations and communities that can use it.

Jacqueline Novogratz, Acumen's founder and CEO, challenged what she called "a false binary between aid and impact investing." She argued that markets serving low-income people often have to be built, and that building them may require subsidies from aid or philanthropy.

Slav Gatchev, the Rockefeller Foundation's vice president of innovative finance, described the scale problem. The foundation's $30 million Zero Gap Fund, created with the MacArthur Foundation in 2019, reports mobilizing more than $1.05 billion in private capital, a 35-to-1 ratio by the foundation's accounting.[3] Yet Gatchev said that even a hundred such funds would not close the financing gap. Philanthropy cannot supply the scale on its own. He pointed to debt reform, public-private partnerships, domestic capital and country ownership as part of the wider response.

Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, CEO of GSG Impact, questioned the assumption that capital itself is always scarce. "Capital is abundant in many of these markets, particularly domestic capital," she said. The challenge, in her view, is creating the conditions that allow it to be used: local coordination, transparency, accountability, and regulatory change.

The panelists did not suggest that private investment could replace public funding. They agreed impact investing cannot substitute for the public money that underpins development work.[2] Their point was that different sources of capital can work together, and that they need the right conditions in place for that to happen.

Together, their comments point to more than one constraint. In some settings, organizations may lack the capacity to absorb large awards. In others, capital may be available, but the rules, institutions, or financing structures needed to move it are missing. These are design and delivery problems alongside the real decline in public funding.

The funding contraction

The OECD's preliminary data for 2025, released in April, put official development assistance from Development Assistance Committee members at $174.3 billion, down 23.1% in real terms. The OECD described this as the largest annual contraction on record.[4]

That decline matters. But it does not settle every question about where development finance is constrained. Public funding has fallen sharply; some private and domestic capital is available; and the arrangements that connect capital to organizations and programs can be slow or difficult to replicate. How those conditions interact will shape whether organizations can adapt or stall.

What leaders on the sidelines described

The Devex panel focused on finance. Elsewhere during UNGA week, the AP spoke with leaders describing how organizations are responding to aid cuts.

John Hecklinger, co-CEO of Global Fund for Children, works between major foundations and grassroots nonprofits. He told the AP that foundations remain in "soul-searching mode." In his assessment, funders cannot fill every gap and are reluctant to restore the previous system.[1]

Ann Lee, co-founder and CEO of CORE, described the response as lacking a coordinated plan. She called the overall vision disjointed and summed it up as "very, very sort of ad hoc."[1] These are practitioners describing what they see in their own work. I have called the pattern "resilience theater": activity that looks like a response to a crisis but leaves an organization's revenue model largely unchanged. Coalitions form, campaigns launch, and convenings multiply. Those efforts may help, but they do not, by themselves, change where revenue comes from or how it is earned. Read alongside the finance panel, the AP's reporting captures two sides of the same difficulty. Some leaders see available capital that cannot readily be put to work; others describe responses to funding cuts as improvised. The reports do not establish that every organization faces the same problem. They do suggest that adding money alone will not fix weaknesses in financing structures or organizational capacity.

New donors, familiar funding

The AP also reported that more nonprofits are approaching donors in the Arab Gulf. Hammam bin Nasser bin Juraied, executive director of the Arab Gulf Programme for Development, told the AP that leaders in the region recognize the need "to fund and to bridge the gap."[1]

ALNAP's “Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026” provides a measure of that shift. Gulf donors supplied 17% of public international humanitarian assistance in 2025, up from 10% in 2024. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia ranked fourth and fifth among public donors.[5]

Those funds matter. They also remain public humanitarian assistance. Replacing a government grant from one country with a grant from another expands an organization's donor base, but it does not necessarily diversify the instruments it uses to earn or raise revenue. The organization may still depend on funds governments allocate according to their own priorities and timetables.

Diversifying mechanisms means building other kinds of income and finance: earned revenue that can produce a surplus, corporate partnerships tied to operational value, or blended structures where grant capital absorbs early risk and enables other investment. The Devex panelists discussed versions of this approach from the financing side.

Cristina Shapiro of UNICEF USA offered an example from the recipient side. She described a World Bank-linked bond that raised $50 million for the organization's fundraising operations and was structured to return $3 for every $1 invested.[2] It is an unusual example. UNICEF USA has the balance sheet, credit relationships, and structuring capacity to issue a bond against future fundraising revenue. Most NGOs do not. The case shows what such financing can involve, while also showing why every organization can't simply copy it.

A year later, a different conversation

In October 2025, I wrote in Devex about another Impact House, held alongside the World Bank Annual Meetings in Washington, D.C.[6] I argued that panels on blended finance and catalytic capital were avoiding a necessary part of the conversation: profit. Private partners need a reason to invest, and the sector should be more direct about that.

This year's Devex panel spoke openly about subsidies, risk, first-loss capital, and returns. The conversation has moved toward the financial terms that make partnerships possible. Many organizations that might receive this capital still need the governance and financial systems to manage it.

That is the subject of the white paper Beyond Grants is working on. It examines how organizations can combine grants, earned revenue, corporate partnerships, and blended finance, along with the governance and financial systems each approach requires. It offers no universal formula; however, it sets out a way to think about revenue design and the organizational capacity that funders and investors described from their side of the table.

What it takes to absorb capital

What would an organization need to manage a $500 million contribution?

It would need a balance sheet and controls that can hold and manage the money, governance that can oversee risk, and systems for deploying funds over several years. It would also need to retain some surplus, as an organization that depends entirely on its next award has little room to absorb risk, invest in infrastructure, or sustain work between funding cycles. Grants remain essential. They pay for work markets will not support, and they can absorb early risk that makes other forms of finance possible. I'm okay with grants. I'm not okay with grant dependency. Dependency can leave an organization structurally unable to build the capacity to receive and manage other forms of capital. The question facing the sector is not only how to replace lost public money. It is also whether organizations can develop the financial structures and operating capacity to use the capital that is available to them.

A $500 million check calls for more than a larger fundraising ask. It calls for an organization built to manage the money and sustain the work it is meant to fund.

Endnotes

[1] James Pollard, "New humanitarian players hit UN sidelines in search of galvanizing force to counter aid cuts," Associated Press, September 25, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-foreign-aid-usaid-cuts-28b5b78d90054e38bad48a2999df02c8

[2] Jesse Chase-Lubitz, "Impact investing goes mainstream, but who gets left behind?," Devex, September 24, 2026. https://www.devex.com/news/impact-investing-goes-mainstream-but-who-gets-left-behind-113412

[3] The Rockefeller Foundation, "Zero Gap Fund's Catalytic Capital Keeps Multiplying: $30M Sustains $1.05B for the UN Sustainable Development Goals," July 16, 2026. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/zero-gap-funds-catalytic-capital-multiplying-30m-sustains-1-05b-un-sustainable-development-goals/

[4] OECD, "Preliminary official development assistance levels in 2025," released April 9, 2026. https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/publication/oecd-preliminary-official-development-assistance-levels-2025_en  

[5] ALNAP, Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026, Chapter 1 (Gulf share of public international humanitarian assistance) and Top Donors profile (rankings). https://alnap.hacdn.io/media/documents/GHA_report_2026_-_Chapter_1_1506_v1.pdf and https://alnap.hacdn.io/media/documents/ALNAP_GHA_2026_-_Top_Donors_1606v1.pdf

[6] Claudio Tanca, "Missing at Devex Impact House: How profit can be purpose's best ally," Devex, October 30, 2025. https://www.devex.com/news/missing-at-devex-impact-house-how-profit-can-be-purpose-s-best-ally-111211