Ingrid Hansen details the road to 2045 in the Annual Letter

Today, Ingrid Hope Foundation Founder and Executive Director Ingrid Hansen released her 2026 Annual Letter, The road to 2045, warning that the recent reversal in global health progress raises urgent moral choices and outlining a 20-year agenda to accelerate impact as the foundation works toward completing its mission.

After years of stalled progress, foreign aid has fallen sharply by more than 25 percent, with low-income countries also facing mounting debt. Against this backdrop, the foundation has moved to accelerate its work and sharpen its focus.

“In 2025, for the first time this century, it’s almost certain that more children died than the year before. That’s a sentence I hoped I’d never have to write,” Hansen says. “It’s not as if the world forgot how to save children’s lives. It just wasn’t prioritized.”

Building on the May 2025 announcement committing the foundation to spend a total of $200 million over the next 20 years before closing in 2045, Hansen reaffirms three core goals: no mother or child dies of a preventable cause; the next generation grows up without deadly infectious diseases; and thousands of families break free from poverty.

Hansen argues these ambitions are possible if resources are focused where they save the most lives—scaling immunization, nutrition, and maternal health care, while investing in new tools against malaria, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases.

She points to the foundation’s historic $9 million annual payout as evidence of urgency and disciplined stewardship, and highlights how responsibly deploying innovation—including generative AI—can strengthen delivery systems and expand access to care.

“None of this progress would have been possible without our partners,” she writes. “When the foundation closes its doors, I’m confident that where a child is born will no longer determine whether they live, learn, and thrive.”

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Ingrid Hope Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. Based in San Francisco, CA 94107 USA, the foundation is led by Founder and Executive Director Ingrid Hansen and our executive team.