MacArthur Foundation awards $100M to outbreak surveillance network, a boost amid global health cuts

The MacArthur Foundation announced Tuesday a landmark $100 million award to Sentinel, a pan-African infectious disease surveillance network, at a critical time when global health funding faces significant cuts from major donor countries.

The award comes through the foundation’s 100&Change competition, which seeks to fund ambitious solutions to pressing global challenges. Sentinel’s approach creates cost-effective pathogen detection tests, deploys real-time outbreak tracking tools, and trains local scientists to implement community-led responses to disease threats.

“This investment affirms that solutions to global health challenges can be led from Africa,” said Christian Happi, Sentinel co-director and leader of the Institute of Genomics and Global Health at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria. “Sentinel is about trust, collaboration, and building the systems that allow every country to respond swiftly and confidently to disease threats.”

The network has already trained more than 3,000 public health workers from 53 of Africa’s 54 countries. With this substantial funding, Sentinel plans to expand its geographic reach over the next five years, creating a more robust early warning system for previously undetected diseases.

By recognizing an African-led initiative that empowers public health officials from the ground up, the MacArthur Foundation aims to inspire similar bold investments from other philanthropic organizations.

Chris Cardona, managing director of Exploration, Discovery and Programs at the MacArthur Foundation, noted that in the ten years since launching 100&Change, they’ve seen increased interest in both larger philanthropic grants and greater attention to global health.

“This grant is further wind in those sails, I’d say,” Cardona explained. “But given the scale of the challenge and the size of the funding gaps, there’s much more to be done.”

The award comes at a precarious moment for global health programs. Major donor countries, particularly the United States, have been stepping back from multilateral efforts. Gavi, the public-private alliance that has funded vaccinations for over a billion children, faces a significant replenishment shortfall as the Trump administration reduces U.S. support.

Additionally, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff were recently instructed to stop working with the World Health Organization, a move experts warn will hamper responses to outbreaks like the current mpox epidemic in Africa. While the Trump administration has pledged to prioritize disease surveillance in its reshaping of U.S. foreign assistance, it has simultaneously proposed canceling $500 million for infectious disease and maternal health activities, plus another $400 million dedicated to addressing global HIV.

The uncertainty surrounding global development commitments has become so pronounced that even the Gates Foundation, one of the most influential institutions in global health, delayed the release of its annual progress report on global development goals.

“This work in Africa would be important because, as the U.S. and European nations pull out from support globally, we will have less visibility of what’s going on overseas,” said Dr. Ali S. Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health.

Sentinel began as a collaboration between Happi’s lab in Nigeria and Dr. Pardis Sabeti’s lab at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, initially focusing on Lassa fever. Their fieldwork in affected villages provided crucial insights they couldn’t have gained without deep community engagement.

Now, their mission has expanded to equip local communities with the necessary diagnostic technologies and professional connections to identify, control, and provide early warnings about emerging health threats.

Dr. Sabeti described the award as “transformative” in a time when public health infrastructure faces “existential crises” and is being “decimated” by funding cuts. As traditional international support mechanisms weaken, empowering local frontline responders becomes increasingly vital.

“By giving people in communities the information that they need, they end up becoming sentinels for an emerging outbreak,” Sabeti said. “And it’s really allowing every person on the planet to participate in stopping the next pandemic.”

Nidhi Bouri, former USAID Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health, emphasized that pandemic surveillance requires consistent, uninterrupted monitoring. The current funding landscape highlights the need for diverse financing sources beyond traditional government channels.

“There is a collective responsibility — but more so a collective interest globally — for a range of stakeholders to evaluate how they can support different investments with the shared goal of mitigating the spread of diseases across the globe,” Bouri said. “Because it impacts everyone.”