Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Overview
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Founded Since 1850
Company Description
About Us
Our mission is to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.
We are a nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world.
Our story
From early childhood, we each saw how our parents helped out in our local communities, and we were taught that anything is possible.
Unfortunately, factors outside of anyone’s control make it hard for some people to reach their potential: things like when they were born, who their parents are, where they grew up, whether they are a boy or a girl.
We wake up every day determined to use our resources to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to lead a healthy and productive life. Most importantly, we believe this: All lives have equal value. That’s why we made the decision to donate our wealth from Microsoft to help others.
The challenge when we started out was how to do that in a meaningful and high-impact way. We were drawn to things that sprang from our experience, so we began donating PCs to public libraries across the United States to give everyone a chance to use one. As we read and traveled more, we also became curious about inequalities further from home.
One day, we read a newspaper article about millions of children in poor countries who die from diseases, such as diarrhea and pneumonia, that were easily treated in wealthier countries. That blew our minds. As new parents it hit us especially hard. If there’s anything worse than the death of a child, we said to each other, then surely, it’s the preventable death of a child. We sent the article to Bill Sr. with a note:
Those eight words changed the rest of our lives.
We started consulting experts, learning from locals in the countries where we wanted to work, and researching disease and poverty more deeply. We tried to figure out how we might use our voices to raise the visibility of global health, and how our resources could start saving and transforming lives.
We also expanded our work in the United States from providing access to computers and the Internet to making sure that every student had an equal opportunity to learn, graduate, and succeed.
As our commitment to our work grew, we transferred $20 billion of Microsoft stock to our foundation, making it the largest of its kind in the world. We devoted more and more time to its work until we were both doing it full-time. And when our good friend Warren Buffett donated much of his fortune to our foundation, it allowed us to raise our ambitions about taking on the toughest, most important problems.
Our foundation has spent $53.8 billion since 2000, and we think that’s helped our partners make a difference. How do we know? We are committed to measuring progress so we can see what’s working and what isn’t. We’d like to leave you with one chart we find most hopeful.
It’s this. The number of children who die each year before their fifth birthday. It’s fallen by half since the year 2000. Millions more kids are surviving. That makes us optimistic.
ABOUT GRAND CHALLENGES
Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems.
A Family of Initiatives with One Purpose
Grand Challenges initiatives use challenges to focus attention and effort on specific problems, and they can be traced back to the mathematician David Hilbert, who over a century ago defined a set of unsolved problems to spark progress in the field of mathematics. Grand Challenges initiatives launch challenges as open requests for grant proposals, refining the process of sourcing innovation over time. Each challenge is an experiment in focusing innovation on making an impact. Each addresses some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives. Each builds a grant program that fosters collaboration across projects to speed impact.
In 2003, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched Grand Challenges in Global Health. This initiative initially focused on 14 major scientific challenges and awarded 44 grants totaling over $450 million for research projects and with an additional supporting project addressing ethical, social, and cultural issues across the initiative. The first decade of progress yielded diverse types of impact, and new challenges continue to be launched. In 2007, the Gates Foundation launched Grand Challenges Explorations to engage more of the world’s innovators more quickly through $100K initial grants addressing a range of challenges. Evolution of the initial projects over the first ten years confirmed that great ideas come from everywhere.
In 2021, the Gates Foundation launched Grand Challenges Global Call-to-Action to build on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and fund cutting-edge science projects that together advance high-priority global health objectives while supporting and expanding a locally-led research and development ecosystem with a balance of women investigators. Through a long-term approach to enable transformational partnerships, it will invest in platforms that link the local institutions that train and connect innovators, and it will directly support the local people that co-create and implement global health programs, including through the Calestous Juma Science Leadership Fellowship in Africa.
A Network of Partners
The Gates Foundation and other funders continue to launch new Grand Challenges initiatives, both independently and in partnership. Partnership initiatives like Grand Challenges Africa and Grand Challenges India anchor the work from the beginning around the local researchers, policymakers, and funders with the knowledge and perspective needed to create, guide, and accelerate transformative solutions to global health and development inequity. Every year, the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting – held in 11 countries in its first 15 years – brings together members of the network of partners from the Grand Challenges family and beyond, fostering collaboration and seeking to build on momentum and accelerate impact.
As the Grand Challenges family of initiatives grows, the world map of awarded grants fills in and the international network of research and funding partnerships expands, helping ensure that everyone receives the full benefit of scientific progress.
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