International Fundraising

More than $4.3 billion was pledged by major public and private donors at a conference in London on Monday to aid projects vaccinating children in developing countries. The conference — co-hosted by the British Government and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) — had hoped to raise $3.7 billion.

Donors included corporations, philanthropists like Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and governments donating to GAVI for the first time, including Japan and Brazil.

Certain ideas make so much sense that one wonders why no one thought of them sooner. Case in point: Global leaders struggled for decades to think of a way to improve education. Ten years ago, Fred Mednick, Ph.D., started his nonprofit aimed at supporting those who can best provide that education.

Private giving to the developing world fell slightly in the first year of the global recession, a new study says.

Private philanthropy from all developed to developing countries, plus remittances from migrants to their families and villages back home, totaled $227 billion in 2009, down from $234 billion in 2008, while government aid fell to $120 billion from $121 billion, says the 2011 Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances, published the Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institute.

Japan is set to make the traumatic leap from being one of the world's most generous aid donors to one of its biggest aid recipients as it begins the mammoth task of cleaning up the wreckage left by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami.

According to the World Bank, the total cost of the recovery will be $235 billion (£143 billion), which would make it the world's most expensive disaster. The Japanese Red Cross said it had received $2.2 billion in foreign donations but had been unable to distribute the bulk of it.

"Philanthropy in Israel is still based on a lot of foreign funding and the relative increase in Israeli donations doesn't reflect the wealth is Israeli society," claims Professor Hillel Shmidt, a senior faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy.

According to new data set to be published by the center, Israeli philanthropy makes up only 0.7% of the Gross Domestic Product compared with 2.1% in the U.S. and 0.73% GDP in England.

Development aid news and job board service Devex recently announced the Devex Top 40 Development Innovators.

Aid flows from OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donor countries totalled USD 129 billion in 2010, the highest level ever, and an increase of 6.5 percent over 2009. This represents about 0.32 percent of the combined gross national income of DAC member countries. While the 2010 figures demonstrate a commitment to the neediest countries, they also confirm that some donors are not meeting targets they set.

Looking ahead, a recent OECD survey shows that most donors plan to increase aid over the coming three years, though at a sharply reduced pace.

While the popular uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa have posed immediate challenges for charities, many nonprofit officials say they are hopeful that philanthropy will soon have new opportunities in the region. The starkest example of a new climate may be in Tunisia, where the mid-January ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s authoritarian president, has meant that nonprofits once repressed by the government are now advising the political transition.

An international charity represented by Thunder guard Thabo Sefolosha is helping to forge a connection among three countries.

An Oscar Night party organized by Sefolosha and his wife, Bertille, included about 200 guests, who came from as far away as Switzerland to raise money to help children in South Africa.

The $50,000 the event raised and the links formed illustrate a broader perspective that the Oklahoma City Thunder has helped bring to the community since the team’s arrival in 2008.

In a keynote speech to open a conference at New York University’s Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising, which was designed to teach nonprofit leaders around the world how to raise money, Dame Stephanie Shirley, Britain’s ambassador for philanthropy, said she would hold a global meeting in London in November to draw attention to the idea that such a position could elevate the importance of giving. (Watch her entire speech.)