Brazil Science Philanthropy Fills Funding Gaps
When One Line Item Decides Everything
Brazil’s research system has long rested on a single assumption: that government money will arrive, and that it will cover every line of a project. When that assumption holds, a laboratory hums along. When it breaks, a single unfunded item — a utility pole, a power connection, a cable trench — can strand an entire experiment. That is the parameter that changes everything. Not the size of a grant, but whether the grant can bend to meet the one cost nobody wrote down.
A decade ago, Brazil had no organized charitable machinery for science at all. Wealthy donors gave to health, to education, to social programs. Research was left to the state. Then came the Serrapilheira Institute, the country’s first non-profit dedicated to funding scientific research. It has now distributed more than US$25 million to early-career researchers, and other philanthropic science funders have appeared in its wake. [1]
The timing matters. Former president Jair Bolsonaro cut science funding during his tenure from 2019 to 2023. [1] The philanthropic layer that emerged during those years now exists as a buffer that did not exist before.
The Pole That Saved a Project
The mechanism is not grand. It is granular, and it shows up in the smallest line items. Biologist Paulo Teixeira, at the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture in Piracicaba, won public funding to build a growth chamber for studying the immune system of plants. [2] His initial proposal did not explicitly include the cost of connecting the new building to the electrical grid. Without that connection, the chamber was a room with no power. He used funding from the Serrapilheira Institute to buy a utility pole and make the connection, salvaging the project. [1] “I don’t know what I would’ve done without that money,” he says.
That is how private money works here: not as a replacement for public grants, but as the flexible margin around them. In the United States, says Kate Lowry, strategy director at the Science Philanthropy Alliance in New York City, “philanthropy has been able to provide a little bit of bridge support” to science. [3] The alliance is a coalition of heavyweight funders including the Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, and Wellcome in London. [4] “The same could be true in Brazil,” Lowry says.
The cultural obstacle is real. Historically, scientists at leading public universities in Brazil have been critical of researchers who accept private donations, arguing that science should be fully funded by the government. And donors themselves rarely think of research first. Philanthropist Jose Luiz Egydio Setubal, who heads a foundation focused on child and adolescent health, puts it plainly: “In a country with so much inequality and with a wide range of social problems, people don’t see science as a priority.”
Studying the Shift as It Happens
What anchors the trend is not a forecast but an institution. In 2023, Brazil’s leading university, the University of Sao Paulo, launched a research centre to study and foster science philanthropy. [6] The centre treats the trend as an object of study rather than a passing gesture. Biologist Guilherme Longo, who studies the effect of climate change on coral bleaching, is one of the recipients of funding from Serrapilheira. His work sits at the intersection of two pressures: a warming ocean and a funding landscape being rebuilt in real time, with the Serrapilheira grant covering the costs his public funding could not. The centre at the University of Sao Paulo now exists to understand how that rebuilding works, and whether it holds.
Sources
2. Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture
3. Science Philanthropy Alliance
5. Wellcome