Children's Investment Fund Foundation

Children's Investment Fund Foundation

CIFF was founded in 2002 when Sir Chris Hohn and Jamie Cooper-Hohn seeded an endowment from The Children's Investment Fund Management, the activist hedge fund Hohn launched the same year. The foundation is now an independent organization, with its endowment managed separately by TCI, and focuses on transforming health, nutrition, climate resilience, and opportunity for children and adolescents in the Global South. Hohn chairs the board; CEO Kate Hampton leads a team operating from offices in London, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, New Delhi, and Beijing. CIFF deploys over $3.1 billion through direct programmatic grants, outcome-based financing, and ecosystem development work. Its three pillars are strengthening primary health and nutrition, supporting opportunity and choice for women and girls, and catalyzing climate action — always through partnerships with national governments, multilaterals, and local NGOs. The foundation's development finance practice designs blended-capital structures with multilateral development banks to crowd in co-funding. Its Tech4Impact team tests and scales digital tools that improve cost-effectiveness across its interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Beyond its endowment, CIFF draws continued gifts from Hohn and TCI, helping sustain its position as one of Europe's largest independent foundations by deployable capital. The foundation publicly commits to safeguarding as a design principle and aligns its programming with the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement. Kate Hampton also chairs the European Climate Foundation, linking CIFF's climate work to broader European philanthropic networks. CIFF's structural distinction is its integration with an active hedge fund legacy: the endowment remains managed by TCI, and Hohn's ongoing gifts connect the foundation's fortune to the performance of an activist investment vehicle. This tie creates a capital pipeline that few development philanthropies can replicate, while CIFF's insistence on local ownership and rigorous evidence-based monitoring gives it a posture closer to that of a multilateral development agency than a traditional family foundation.