This month, the Trump administration announced nearly $2 billion for faith-based groups, the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based organizations in more than 20 years. The bulk of it, $1.4 billion, funds health services, including an $850 million award to World Vision supporting 2,500 faith-based hospitals and clinics across 17 countries.
Whatever the administration’s ultimate motives, this is an important signal to my public health and humanitarian relief colleagues. Even as the old aid architecture is collapsing, the faith economy is not. Washington has rediscovered faith as a delivery mechanism. The bigger opportunity is faith as a source of capital.
By faith economy, I mean not simply religious charities, but the capital generated, governed, and invested through religious obligations, institutions, and financial systems. Governments and international institutions have worked with faith-based organizations for decades, relying on them to deliver services where public systems cannot. What they have not built is the financial infrastructure to receive, aggregate, and deploy capital that faith itself produces.
In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based providers deliver a significant share of health care — in some countries, an estimated 30%–40%. But the capital generated through religious obligation sits outside the way development finance is counted. Official development assistance measures what donor governments spend; it was never designed to capture what believers give. As a result, some of the world’s oldest and most durable capital flows remain invisible to the institutions designing global financing.
