Operation End Starvation Receives $5M Grant From the Gates Foundation.
Operation End Starvation Receives $5M Grant to Improve Delivery of Lifesaving Malnutrition Treatment for Children
The grant highlights early confidence in OES's public-private model following private seed funding and $100 million from the U.S. Department of State
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Operation End Starvation (OES) today announced a $5 million grant from the Gates Foundation to strengthen how lifesaving treatments, including therapeutic milks and RUTF, reach children with severe acute malnutrition. The grant will test and strengthen ways to make the supply chain as cost-effective as possible so it can reach the maximum number of children. Nearly 43 million children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition, and every 30 seconds one of them dies, despite proven, low-cost treatment.
“The hardest problem in the child malnutrition crisis is not finding a treatment that is effective; we have that. It is everything that stands between a child and that treatment: how it is bought, how it moves, and whether anyone can see where it is,” said Will Moore, CEO of Operation End Starvation and Chairman & CEO of the Eleanor Crook Foundation. “To have the Foundation invest in exactly that, at this early stage in our development, is both validating and motivating. We appreciate their early vote of confidence in what we are building.”
“The global child malnutrition crisis demands both urgency and discipline,” said Kara Weiss, Executive Director of the CRI Foundation and Founding Board Member of OES. “This investment will help OES build the systems needed to move proven treatments more efficiently, use resources more effectively, and learn quickly.”
About Operation End Starvation’s Innovative Model
Launched in June 2026, Operation End Starvation (OES) is a public-private partnership and certified 501(C)(3) charity created to rapidly and sustainably scale the most proven, cost-effective solutions to child deaths from starvation, beginning with RUTF and MMS.
OES combines philanthropic and public funding to increase resources available for fighting child deaths from malnutrition. Every $1 invested in OES unlocks $3 in U.S. government funding.
Through a transparent and competitive bidding process, OES experts:
● Identify the cheapest means of transportation to effectively get two life-saving products from the factory to the countries where acutely malnourished children live;
● Choose the most cost-effective partner in each context to deliver RUTF and MMS to mothers and children; and
● Monitor and evaluate the impact and cost-effectiveness of all the programs and partners we fund, and publicly disclose results.
OES plans to use this model to deliver 3.2 billion packages of RUTF and 14 billion tablets of MMS by 2032. That will save the lives of at least 1.8 million children. From there, OES will continue to scale until all mass child deaths from starvation are eliminated.
OES has already been committed $100 million from the U.S. State Department and raised over $33 million from private donors, including the Eleanor Crook Foundation, CRI Foundation and Annie and Jacob Ma-Weaver. OES will launch RUTF programs in Nigeria and Sudan this fall.
How OES Will Use the Grant
OES will deploy the grant in two phases.
● The initial phase supports therapeutic milks, F-75 and F-100, which are used to stabilize and treat the sickest children. OES will work with partner Axmed to pilot and refine the most cost-effective procurement and delivery model for therapeutic milks, then extend it to Nigeria and Sudan in line with OES's phase 1 priority countries.
● A second phase will then strengthen the procurement and supply ecosystem for RUTF. The funding also builds the infrastructure OES needs to scale, including its management information system, to ensure decisions about supply and programming are driven by timely data and generate evidence about what works and at what cost. OES will work with the Center for Global Action (CEGA) at UC Berkeley to help define the most cost-effective models for OES moving forward.
Taken together, this grant represents an investment in understanding how more children can be treated and recover with the resources available, while generating evidence about what works and at what cost.
