Who Owns FHI 360?

FHI 360 traces its founding to 1971 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where it began as the International Fertility Research Program conducting research on family planning and reproductive health. It later became Family Health International, expanding through the 1980s into one of the world's largest HIV and AIDS research and program portfolios as the epidemic spread.

In 1990 the organization established the FHI Foundation using proceeds from the sale of two for-profit companies, creating an internal engine for new initiatives. The name simplified to FHI in 2010 as the mission broadened beyond health into wider development work.

The defining structural event came in 2011, when FHI acquired the programs, expertise, and assets of the Academy for Educational Development, a Washington-based nonprofit with more than 100 programs across the US and over 50 countries. The merger created FHI 360, adding education, nutrition, economic development, civil society, and youth work to the health portfolio.

For more than a decade FHI 360 operated as one of the largest nonprofit implementers of US foreign assistance, with USAID its dominant funder, receiving the third-most USAID funding of any nongovernmental organization between 2013 and 2022.

The environment changed abruptly in 2025. The Trump administration's dismantling of USAID eliminated roughly half of FHI 360's revenue and forced it to furlough and then permanently lay off more than 1,100 staff, including 483 US employees and more than 700 overseas, while cutting over 70 projects. Senior leaders took steep salary reductions to preserve the organization. Fiscal 2025 revenue fell to $566.6 million from $820.4 million the prior year, with the US government share dropping from $702 million to $446 million.