The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation approved its largest annual budget ever, committing $8.6 billion to help plug gaps in overall aid for health programs in the world’s poorest countries. The spending increase in 2024 will support a range of goals including the eradication of polio, development of new tuberculosis drugs, and delivery of supplies to stem child and maternal mortality.
The 2024 budget builds on the organization’s $7 billion spent in 2022 and its $8.3 billion allocation for 2023. The new record won’t stand for long, though. The foundation, which was established in 2000, has pledged to increase yearly spending to $9 billion by 2026.
“With low-income countries facing a whole host of challenges, now is the right time to recommit to saving lives and improving livelihoods,” said Melinda French Gates, who co-chairs the foundation with her former husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Addressing infant and maternal mortality, and global disparities
Over the past two decades, worldwide deaths from malaria and HIV were reduced by half, and polio cases have all but disappeared. But progress in other critical areas has stalled or reversed. After 15 years of steady, broad-based declines in the number of women dying in childbirth, the statistics are now worsening in many countries, including the US. The infant mortality rate has fallen only 2% a year since 2000; roughly 5 million children around the world die before the age of five.
In most areas, the disparities between rich and poor countries are glaring. According to the Gates Foundation, 340,000 women die every year from cervical cancer despite effective vaccinations for the disease; 90% of those deaths occur in low- or middle-income countries.
“The Gates Foundation measures impact in terms of lives saved and opportunities provided to the poorest,” foundation CEO Mark Suzman said. “The new high-water mark for our budget will further our mission to help create a world where everyone has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.”
The outsize impact of organizations like the Gates Foundation has not been without its critics, who argue that private philanthropies can be more stringent than governments in tying donations to priorities of their choosing, and quicker to pull funding when their fortunes reverse. But the criticism in and of itself has not plugged funding holes left by the increased indebtedness and tightened aid budgets of many nations.
The Gates Foundation in Davos
Bill Gates and other representatives of the Gates Foundation are in Davos, Switzerland, this week for the World Economic Forum. Here, they will press the case for accelerating the production of health innovations that are already in the development pipeline, and making portable equipment and medicines more available in places with poor access.
To drive the point home, they’ll be wearing backpacks around Davos containing kits of life-saving products, including:
🎒 A drape to measure blood loss in childbirth
🎒 A one-dose HPV vaccine that prevents common cervical cancers
🎒 Patches that can deliver vaccines without needles
🎒 Diagnostic test strips for identifying cases of malaria (which often go undetected)
🎒 Nutritional supplements that can be taken in pregnancy to reduce preterm delivery and stillbirths
Find more of Quartz’s Davos coverage here, and sign up for our Need to Know: Davos 2024 newsletter to have dispatches delivered straight to your inbox.