Gates Foundation

The Gates Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation established in 2000 by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and his then-wife, businesswoman Melinda Gates. Its grant-making and advocacy efforts are focused on eliminating global inequities and increasing opportunities for those in need through programs that address global agricultural and economic development, medical research and public health initiatives in developing countries, and the improvement of education and access to information in the United States.

The foundation originally planned to operate until 50 years after the deaths of its founders, but in 2025, Bill Gates detailed a new timeline. The organization intends to wind down by 2045, allowing its resources to be spent more urgently.

Based in Seattle, the foundation also has offices in Washington, D.C.; London; Berlin; New Delhi; Beijing; and several locations in Africa, such as Johannesburg; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Abuja, Nigeria; Dakar, Senegal; and Nairobi, Kenya.

Early foundations and philanthropic focus

In 1994, Bill and Melinda Gates established the William H. Gates Foundation, which focused its charitable giving on advancing global health and the community of the Pacific Northwest. Gates’s father, William, managed the activities of that entity. Three years later, the Gates Library Foundation was created; its aim was to improve Internet access to public libraries for low-income families in North America. It was later renamed the Gates Learning Foundation to reflect its expansion into broader education efforts.

Formation and restructuring of the Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 through the merger of the two Gates foundations. Its original priorities were global health, education, libraries, and the Pacific Northwest. In 2006, the foundation reorganized to comprise Global Development, Global Health, and U.S. divisions (a Global Policy & Development division was added in 2012).

Also in 2006, the investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett made a lifetime pledge to the foundation of Berkshire Hathaway stock valued at $31 billion. At that time the foundation changed its structure, creating a trust (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust) to manage and invest the endowment assets. In July 2008, Bill Gates stepped down from his position at Microsoft to devote his efforts full-time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2021, Gates and Melinda Gates divorced. That same year, Warren Buffett resigned as a foundation trustee. In 2024, Melinda Gates stepped away to continue work with her own organization, Pivotal Ventures. The Gates Foundation is led by CEO Mark Suzman and a board of trustees. It operates with an annual budget of about $9 billion and plans to focus its final decades on areas with the greatest potential for long-term impact.

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Global Development division: Agriculture, finance, and libraries

The Global Development division strives to eliminate extreme poverty and hunger. Through strategic partnerships and grant-making activities in its agricultural development initiative, the program helps increase opportunities for farmers in developing countries and supports research on the production of rice and flour enriched with micronutrients.

The program also seeks to increase financial services to the poor by funding projects that examine the effectiveness of loans, insurance, financial planning, and financial education in impoverished countries. In addition, Global Development is committed to global libraries, supporting public libraries and organizations that work to increase access to information technology. Finally, the program’s Global Special Initiatives awards grants to organizations that research issues of concern to the developing world, including water, sanitation, and hygiene. Although both the Global Development and Global Health divisions contribute to public health work, leadership on vaccine delivery rests primarily with the Global Health division.

U.S. division: Education, equity, and opportunity

The U.S. division is dedicated to reducing inequities and increasing opportunities for the country’s low-income, minority, and vulnerable populations. The U.S. program houses the foundation’s education initiative, which focuses on keeping young students from dropping out of school and better preparing high school graduates for college. The program also oversaw the public libraries initiative, which provided access to computers and the Internet at some 99% of U.S. public libraries; the Gates Foundation invested $240 million in the initiative, which completed its goals in 2003.

Another initiative of the U.S. program addresses the issues of inequity and opportunity for families and children living in Washington state. It supports projects that work with at-risk youth and that help to reduce homelessness among families in the region. The U.S. program also seeks to identify needs that fall outside the program’s established purview, thus shaping potential new directions for the program, and advocates for the foundation’s domestic efforts.

Global Health division: Disease research and vaccine access

Both the Global Development and the Global Health divisions work to address high mortality and morbidity rates from preventable diseases in developing countries. The Global Development division is concerned with:

• Agricultural development
• Sanitation and hygiene
• Nutrition
• Polio
• Vaccine delivery
• Emergency response
• Maternal, newborn, and child health

The Global Health program focuses on:

• Enteric and diarrheal diseases
• HIV/AIDS
• Malaria
• Neglected tropical diseases
• Pneumonia
• Tuberculosis

The foundation funds projects to increase access to existing vaccines and treatments for common diseases and supports research into new, affordable, and practical health technologies. The diseases it focuses on cause widespread illness and death in developing countries, represent the greatest inequities in health between developed and developing countries, and receive inadequate attention and funding.

The Global Health division also supports projects that advance health research and technologies in the developing world. It supports the development of affordable and accurate medical tools and funds the research and development of vaccines to prevent infectious diseases. The division’s Grand Challenges initiative funds potential scientific breakthroughs in the prevention, treatment, and cure of diseases in the developing world.

Global Policy & Advocacy: Partnerships and public awareness

In addition to the disease-specific and special initiatives, the foundation has a Global Policy & Advocacy division. It builds strategic relationships with governments and with public and private sectors, promotes public policies that advance the work of the foundation, and raises public awareness of the issues the Gates Foundation deals with. It also handles the foundation’s global health advocacy efforts, notably tobacco control, and global health interventions at the local and regional community levels. In the 2020s, the division also expanded its work to include strengthening public health systems and supporting climate adaptation efforts in vulnerable regions.

A planned sunset: Gates’s 2045 wind-down commitment

The foundation’s decision to wind down operations by 2045 reflects a growing urgency to address global challenges within a fixed time frame. “I think 20 years is the right balance between giving as much as we can to make progress on these things and giving people a lot of notice that now this money will be gone,” Gates said in 2025.