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Illustrative Grant Commitments
* The GAVI Alliance, expanding childhood immunization - $1.5 billion
* United Negro College Fund, Gates Millennium Scholars Program - $1.37 billion
* Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), improving seeds and soil for African farmers - $456 million
* Rotary International, polio eradication - $355 million
* PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) - $287 million
* Save the Children, Saving Newborn Lives - $112 million
* United Way of King County - $85 million
* World Food Programme, increasing small farmer income - $66 million
* TechnoServe, helping small coffee farmers improve crops and fetch higher prices - $47 million
* Heifer International, helping small farmers grow local and regional dairy markets - $43 million
* Mexico, National Council on Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), Global Libraries Program - $30 million
* Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), testing and promoting the use of information and communications technologies to deliver microfinance products - $24 million
* Achieve, Inc. and the American Diploma Project Network, assisting states in aligning high school standards with the expectations of college and career - $23 million
* Chicago Public Schools, curriculum support - $21 million
* Opportunity Online Program, multiple library systems - $16.4 million
* Opportunity International Inc., developing and expanding a network of commercial banks in Africa - $15.4 million
* Green Dot Public Schools, supporting the transformations of Jefferson and Locke high schools in Los Angeles, Calif., into high-performing charter high schools - $9.7 million
to accelerate progress against the world’s most acute poverty.
What We Do
Agricultural Development
Agricultural Development
Three quarters of the 1.1 billion people living on less than $1 a day live in rural areas, and most rely on agriculture for their food and income. We work to help these small farmers boost their productivity, increase their incomes, and build better lives for their families.
Learn More
Financial Services for the Poor
Financial Services for the Poor
Fewer than 10 percent of the world's poor have access to safe, affordable financial services. We are working with a wide range of public and private partners to help make microfinance—particularly savings accounts—widely accessible to poor people throughout the developing world.
Learn More
Global Libraries
Special Initiatives
We learn and have impact across a range of development issues to help reduce poverty and increase opportunities.
* Libraries
* Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene
* Urban Poverty
* Emergency Relief
Policy and Advocacy
Policy and Advocacy
Lasting progress against global hunger and poverty will take international attention and commitment—from all corners and across all sectors. We work to increase awareness of global development issues, identify and promote powerful solutions, and advocate for more—and more effective—investments.
Global Health Program
What We Do
Our Global Health Program harnesses advances in science and technology to save lives in poor countries. We focus on the health problems that have a major impact in developing countries but get too little attention and funding. Where proven tools exist, we support sustainable ways to improve their delivery. Where they don’t, we invest in research and development of new interventions, such as vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.
How We Work
Most of our work is done through grants to partners in our priority areas of focus. Along the way, we seek extensive input from external experts and from our Global Health advisory panel.
In China and India, we have established offices to help manage large programs there. Many of our health efforts are integrated with those in our Global Development program, which focuses on reducing poverty and hunger.
Priority Areas of Focus
Our work in infectious diseases focuses on developing ways to fight and prevent enteric and diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and neglected and other infectious diseases.
We also work on integrated health solutions for family planning, nutrition, maternal, neonatal and child health, tobacco control and vaccine-preventable diseases.
Three cross-cutting programs help us successfully address our areas of focus. These include:
* Discovery – Closing gaps in knowledge and science and creating critical platform technologies in areas where current tools are lacking.
* Delivery – implementing and scaling up proven approaches by identifying and proactively addressing the obstacles that typically lie in the path of adoption and uptake
* Policy & Advocacy– Promoting more and better resources, effective policies, and greater visibility of global health so that we may effectively address the foundation’s priority health targets
GLOBAL HEALTH PROGRAM
* Program Overview
* Leadership Team
* Program Advisory Panel
* Our Strategies
* Gates Award for Global Health
* Grand Challenges in Global Health
RELATED INFO
Global Health Program Fact Sheet
(PDF, 338KB, 2 pages)
Our Work in China
Our Work in India - Avahan
ONLINE RESOURCES
CSIS Commission on Smart Global Health Policy Report: 'A healthier, safer, and more prosperous world'
Case Studies for Global Health
Haiti Earthquake Relief Information
nited States Program
We believe that when all people in the United States have the opportunity to develop their talents, our society thrives.
Our mission: Help ensure greater opportunity for all Americans through the attainment of secondary and postsecondary education with genuine economic value.
How We Work
We work with partners to tackle some of the difficult problems we face in the United States. Our primary focus is on improving public education.
We focus on these priority areas:
* Education: We work to make sure high school students graduate ready for success and prepared to earn postsecondary degrees. We fund college and graduate school scholarships. We support high-quality early learning programs in Washington state.
* Libraries: We support efforts to supply and sustain free public access to computers and the Internet through local public libraries.
* Pacific Northwest: We assist struggling families by supporting innovative community organizations located in the Pacific Northwest and efforts that help break the cycle of homelessness.
* Special Initiatives: We explore new ways to increase opportunities or respond to unique challenges in the United States. These currently include grants that support Postsecondary Education and Emergency Relief efforts. We also offer support to many dedicated and innovative community organizations in the Pacific Northwest.
We also use advocacy to raise awareness of the issues we face, inform government policy, and develop new and innovative ways of financing initiatives that improve outcomes.
Explore United States Program Topics:
* Early Learning
* Emergency Relief
* High Schools
* Family Homelessness
* Libraries
* Pacific Northwest Community Grants
* Postsecondary Education
* Scholarships
Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene
Unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene are leading causes of illness and death in the developing world.
Diarrhea and other water-borne illnesses thrive where people don’t have safe water, adequate sanitation facilities, or effective handwashing routines. Every year 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses. One-quarter of all childhood deaths are caused by unsafe water, sanitation, and hygiene.
These unhealthy conditions impose high costs on the poor, exacerbating poverty.
Poor households lose, on average, three hours every day searching for clean water or places to relieve themselves. That takes away time that could be spent at work or school. Over 9 percent of all illness in the developing world results from poor water, sanitation, and hygiene, leading to billions of days of lost work and missed school each year.
Poor women and girls suffer the greatest social consequences.
In many cultures, women and girls are responsible for traveling long distances to collect the family’s water. This leads to lost educational and income-generating opportunities. The absence of sanitation facilities at home put women at risk of attack in the open, while inadequate toilets at schools are a major deterrent to girls’ attendance, especially once they begin menstruating.
Providing access to basic services has long-term health and economic benefits for poor people in the developing world.
Ensuring reliable and affordable services can reduce illness and death from diarrhea and other water-borne illnesses, increase economic opportunities for households and communities, and improve school attendance, especially by girls.
Our goal is to help tens of millions of people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa benefit from safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Our Approach: Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene
We’re working with partners to expand access to safe water and sanitation for poor people in developing countries; to develop affordable and sustainable methods to deliver services; and to promote effective approaches. We’re supporting the following strategies:
Expand the use of proven solutions and strategies.
Innovative and effective work has been done on a small scale in many places. We’re supporting efforts to replicate the best solutions on a much broader scale. We want to help adapt a variety of successful approaches for widespread use, improving millions of lives.
Help improve the effectiveness of existing large-scale efforts.
Governments and donors provide significant water, sanitation, and hygiene funding and services. We’re partnering with them to identify more affordable, effective, and sustainable ways of providing services to the poor. For example, hardware, such as toilets and wells, is much more likely to be used and maintained when paired with community outreach. We’re working to help increase and expand these approaches by clearly demonstrating their value.
Support market-based approaches for providing services to the poor.
Businesses can often deliver products and services that respond to people's needs, at prices they can afford. We’re working to help businesses increase affordable options for the poor; for example, through kiosks that sell clean drinking water in rural areas for less than a penny a day. Such approaches can help improve the quality, lower the costs, expand the availability, and increase the sustainability of water, sanitation, and hygiene services.
Invest in research and development.
We’re funding research that tackles key questions and brings new insight to the field, particularly in the neglected area of sanitation. We’re also supporting innovations on a broad range of products and services. For example, we’re helping develop a low-cost, easy-to-use test that could reduce illness and save lives by letting people know if the water they’re using is safe.
Increase awareness of the issue and support the development of effective policies.
Water, sanitation and hygiene interventions have been consistently neglected, despite their critical importance. We’re working to call attention to the need and value of safe water, sanitation, and hygiene—and to help policy—and decisionmakers deliver better results for poor people in developing countries.'
Agricultural Development Overview
Approximately 1 billion people live in chronic hunger and more than 1 billion live in extreme poverty.
Many are small farmers in the developing world. Their success or failure determines whether they have enough to eat, are able to send their children to school, and can earn any money to save.
Small farmers in the developing world face many challenges:
* Their soil is often degraded from overuse.
* They lack quality seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and other farming supplies.
* Their crops are threatened by diseases, pests, and drought.
* When small farmers do manage to grow a good crop, they frequently lack access to markets.
Funders have sharply cut their international aid to agricultural development over the past few decades.
The majority of agricultural research and technology doesn’t reach or benefit small farmers in the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture employs two-thirds of the population but accounts for only 4 percent of government spending.
There is little support for women, who do the majority of the work.
In developing countries, women do up to 80 percent of the work on farms, like the planting, harvesting, and processing. They are responsible for both producing the food and preparing it for their families. Yet women farmers receive only 5 percent of extension services and are underrepresented in training programs. There are also few women in agricultural research and policy-making positions.
Improvements in agriculture help people in poverty improve their lives.
When small farmers are able to get more out of their land and labor, their families eat better, earn more money, and lead healthier lives. In Asia and Latin America, improvements in rice and wheat crops several decades ago doubled yields, saved hundreds of millions of lives, and contributed to long-term economic growth. This “Green Revolution” showed it is possible to reduce hunger and poverty on a large scale but demonstrated the importance of focusing on the environment and the needs of small farmers.
We’re working to help small farmers flourish on their farms and overcome hunger and poverty.
Our Approach: Agricultural Development
We support programs that will enable small farmers to break the cycle of hunger and poverty—to sell what they grow or raise, increase their incomes, and make their farms more productive and sustainable. We work with a wide range of partners in the following ways:
Employ a collaborative and comprehensive approach.
There’s no single, simple solution to the challenges small farmers face. We seek the input of a variety of voices, from farmers and field workers to funders and policymakers. Ultimately, we want to offer solutions that help improve agriculture at every step: planting a seed, tending the soil, selling a crop, and setting good policy.
Provide small farmers with the supplies and support they need to succeed.
Successful harvests require quality seeds, healthy soils, appropriate fertilizers, and water and crop management systems. We work to provide small farmers with better farming supplies, training, and support networks. For example, we’re helping the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) develop and distribute locally adapted seeds in 16 countries. In India, we’re funding efforts to provide affordable irrigation systems so farmers don’t have to depend on unreliable rains to water their crops.
Put women at the center of our work.
Women are essential to the success of agriculture in the developing world. Therefore, we’ve developed a strategy to address the needs of women farmers at every step of the way—through increased participation, opportunity, and training. We’re providing research fellowships to 360 African women scientists to ensure that the next generation of agricultural researchers includes women. And we seek to measure the impact of our work on women.
Help small farmers profit from their crops.
Farmers need to sell what they grow to make a profit but often lack access to markets, ways to store and transport their goods, and information about pricing. We’re working to link small farmers to new and existing markets and to the information they need to make sound business decisions. For example, we’re providing small farmers in East Africa with the equipment and training they need to grow and sell higher-quality coffee.
Use science and technology to develop crops that can thrive.
We’re exploring the development of crops that can grow successfully in different soil types and resist drought, disease, and pests. For example, we’re funding the development of drought-resistant varieties of maize, Africa’s main cereal crop. We also support the development of nutritionally enhanced crops to combat vitamin deficiencies.
Gather and analyze data to improve decision-making.
We still need to better understand the challenges and opportunities that small farmers face. To learn more, we support research, data collection, and policy analysis related to agricultural development, including the results of our own work. We’re funding several analyses of hunger, poverty, and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa to inform policymaking and identify areas of opportunity.
Encourage greater investment and involvement in agricultural development.
Small farmers need more attention and resources to succeed. We’re working to increase investments in agriculture from leaders in developing countries as well as from funders and partners in the developed world. We’re also looking for ways that the private sector can make a difference—whether by doing research, developing products, or opening up new markets that benefit small farmers.
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