The Australia-based Minderoo Foundation has released its 2023 annual report and financial statements, indicating a 50 percent increase in grantmaking year-over-year to A$268 million ($173 million), including a nine-year, $100 million commitment to Co-Impact in support of its gender equality programs.

The grant to the global philanthropic collaborative is the single largest awarded by Minderoo, which Giving Pledgers Andrew and Nicola Forrest established in 2001. It will support Co-Impact’s Gender Fund initiatives to advance gender equality and improve outcomes in health, education, and economic opportunity for at least 100 million people in the global south—predominately Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Grants from the fund are large scale, long-term, and unrestricted and directed to mostly women-led local nonprofits, civil society and women’s rights groups, institutions, associations, and networks.

Other supporters of the fund—which aims to raise $1 billion over the next decade—include the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations, the Thankyou Charitable Trust, and Giving Pledgers Tsitsi Masiyiwa, MacKenzie Scott and her ex-husband Dan Jewett.

According to the Australian Financial Review, the growth in grantmaking by Minderoo following a 2023 gift from its founders of $3.38 billion, has prompted an expansion of its now 10-member executive team, who, with exception of CEO John Hartman, are all women. “We cannot achieve meaningful progress in any area if we leave half of the world’s population behind,” said Minderoo co-chair Nicola Forrest, who is also a member of Co-Impact’s board of directors.

“We want to keep thinking globally and acting locally,” Hartman—who also serves as CEO of the Forrest family’s Tattarang holding company—told the Financial Review. “We want to make sure that we’re bringing partners together and backing partners and empowering our partners to deliver real change.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Delmaine Donson)