The Children's Investment Fund Foundation
The Children's Investment Fund Foundation (UK) (CIFF) is an independent philanthropic organisation with offices in Addis Ababa, Beijing, London, Nairobi and New Delhi. It is a registered charity in England and Wales and in 2018 disbursed $232 million. With assets of GBP £5.2 billion (USD $6.6 billion), it is the 5th largest global development philanthropy in the world. It is also the world's largest philanthropy that focuses specifically on improving children's lives. CIFF was established in 2002 by Sir Chris Hohn and wife, Jamie Cooper-Hohn as the  philanthropic arm of Hohn's hedge fund, the Children's Investment Fund Management (TCI Fund Management), which in 2019, topped the list of the most profitable hedge funds in the world. By utilising a hybrid fund-and-foundation model, Hohn sought to bring a private sector-like approach to philanthropy with intellectual rigour and commercial acumen to attain clear returns for children from the outset. The foundation's approach emphasises a high appetite for risk to invest in bold ideas for transformative and scalable solutions and reliance on high-quality data and evidence. It has pioneered the use of several  innovative financing tools and catalytic funding mechanisms within development contexts and has become one of the leaders in venture philanthropy for global development. Jamie Cooper-Hohn managed CIFF until 2013 when Michael Anderson was appointed Chief Executive Officer. The CEO is now Kate Hampton, a key figure behind the creation of the 2016 Paris Agreement. The Children's Investment Fund Foundations is within the Partner Circle of the Foundations Platform F20, an international network of foundations and philanthropic organizations. History. In an example of "venture philanthropy" or "philanthrocapitalism", CIFF was set up to automatically receive a portion of profits from  TCI fund management. The original formula involved transfers of 0.5 percent of the fund's assets each year, with a further 0.5 per cent of assets for every year during which the fund achieved returns of more than 11 per cent. It is reported that Hohn established the formulaic charitable link in order to motivate himself. Coinciding with the couple's divorce proceedings, changes set in motion in 2012 led to the splitting up of the fund and the foundation. The fund no longer donates money to the foundation on a contractual basis, though it may do so on a  discretionary basis. Activities. CIFF focuses on transforming the lives of poor and vulnerable children living in developing countries. CIFF's investment priorities are childhood and adolescence, child protection, and climate change. Within childhood and adolescence, areas of work include empowering girls and boys to control their sexual and reproductive health and to avoid unwanted pregnancies and HIV/AIDS; improving children and mothers' health and nutrition; preventing low birthweight babies; eliminating deaths from severe acute malnutrition, nested within a more integrated approach to childhood development; and deworming efforts to break transmission for good. In 2019, CIFF in partnership with Wellcome Trust  also launched a joint Lancet-Financial Times Commission on Artificial Intelligence in global health expected to be published by end of 2021. CIFF's child protection work focuses on ending child labour and sexual exploitation by enabling an environment that reduces vulnerability of communities and increases protection of children. The organisation’s climate portfolio is driven by a vision of a climate-safe future for today’s children and future generations that also bear the benefits of cleaner air, energy security and sustainable jobs. Highlights from CIFF's portfolio in 2018 include: Some of the grants CIFF made in 2014  include: In 2013, CIFF committed to spend $787 million over 7 years to tackle malnutrition. This was part of a total pledge of $4.1 billion towards reducing malnutrition announced at the Nutrition for Growth summit in London, co-hosted by the United Kingdom, Brazil and CIFF. In 2012, CIFF was one of the signatories of the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases, a WHO inspired collaborative disease eradication programme of 10 neglected tropical diseases. The Clinton Foundation lists CIFF among 7 organisations from which it received more than US$25 million. According to the OECD, CIFF provided USD  253.4 million for development in 2019, of which 98.9% was provided in the form of grants and 1.1% in the form of non-grants.