The billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates thinks the richest governments should increase their support for African countries that have been overshadowed by development funding increasingly going toward the humanitarian response to the war in Ukraine as well as support for refugees around the world in recent years.
"There’s less money going to Africa at a time when they need it," whether it’s for debt relief, vaccinations or to reduce malnutrition, Gates told The Associated Press in an interview. As a portion of aid money, the funds going to Ukraine are "substantial," he said.
Gates was speaking in the context of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's annual Goalkeeper’s report published on Tuesday. The report holds a mirror to countries’ promises to achieve development goals they set in 2015 and calculates progress for a subset of the Sustainable Development Goals that reflect the priorities of the foundation, which is one of the largest global health funders in the world.
Its focus this year is on child malnutrition, which the foundation projects will be exacerbated by climate change in the coming years. The foundation is advocating for increased use of fortified foods, high quality prenatal vitamins and increased access to safer dairy products.
Progress towards reducing the number of children whose growth and potential are irrevocably harmed by malnutrition is not fast enough, nor is it happening equally around the world and within communities, said Habtamu Fekadu, managing director for nutrition for the nonprofit Save the Children. He said prevention efforts at scale are needed, and the most cost-effective intervention is to encourage mothers to exclusively breastfeed their children in the first six months of their lives.
Despite progress stalling on most of the development goals, Gates writes, "I’m an optimist. I think we can give global health a second act — even in a world where competing challenges require governments to stretch their budgets."
In April, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development pointed to preliminary data from 2023 that showed overall development assistance from the richest countries had increased each year since 2019 — even excluding funds for refugees, COVID-19 and Ukraine — but the portion that has gone to African countries fell in 2022 to a 20-year low of around 25%.
Many low- and middle-income countries around the world, including in Africa, are spending more money to pay back debts. In a report in June, the United Nations said the burden of debt payments was limiting what countries could spend on basic government services like health care, education and climate action. Interest on public debt has also jumped, as the cost of borrowing increased in many parts of the world last year, the report found.
When asked if he saw a role for his foundation to advocate for debt relief, Gates harkened back to a decision in 2005 when world leaders wiped out $40 billion in debts owed by 18 of the world’s poorest countries to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
"In a just world, you would see a movement emerge on behalf of these poorest countries to have that happen again," Gates said.
While the foundation has released its report around the global development goals each September since 2017, this year marks a change from previous years, when both Gates and his now ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, would author a section of the report. But French Gates does not appear this year.
She announced in May that she would step down from her role as the foundation's co-chair. Her departure leaves Gates as the sole principal of the foundation after its other long-time supporter, Warren Buffett, left the board in 2021. The foundation expanded its board of trustees after Buffet's departure.
Buffett has given some $43 billion to the Gates Foundation since 2006, but announced this summer that after his death, he would entrust his three adult children to give away the remainder of his fortune rather than leaving it to the foundation, as he had initially indicated.
Gates praised both Buffett and French Gates, saying he'd recently celebrated Warren's 94th birthday with him in Omaha, Nebraska.
"God bless Warren. He’s really unbelievable. Having Melinda leave is unfortunate. Now, that frees her up to go do a lot of great philanthropic work on her own," he said.
Gates gave $12.5 billion to French Gates to use for charitable purposes when she left. In June, she pledged to give $1 billion in the next two years to organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world.
The Associated Press receives financial support for news coverage in Africa from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and for news coverage of women in the workforce and in statehouses from Melinda French Gates’ organization, Pivotal Ventures.
The Gates Foundation has one of the largest endowments of any foundation at $75.2 billion and it planned to grant out $8.4 billion in 2024.
"We’re very lucky that my remaining resources allow us to keep being ambitious," Gates said.
Jessica Sklair, an anthropologist at Queen Mary University of London who has studied the philanthropic decisions of wealthy families, is critical of the broad influence the Gates Foundation has had on shaping international development without democratic accountability. But she said the Gates Foundation will remain in a league of its own in terms of the scale of its resources, even without receiving the remainder of Buffett’s fortune.
"They’ll still have enough money to do a lot of what they do," she said.
