OVERVIEW: The Gates Foundation funds nonprofit and for-profit organizations in dozens of issue areas, with a large footprint in infant and maternal health, family planning, vaccines and diseases, education, gender equity & financial inclusion, food & agriculture, and global development. Grantmaking is global in scope, with partnerships in over 130 countries.
IP TAKE: The Gates Foundation has long been considered one of the most influential philanthropies in the world. According to an analysis by IP’s Philip Rojc, “in terms of both its scale and its long-cultivated role as a unique arbiter in the realm of global health and development, the Gates Foundation is a kind of lynchpin for the current global philanthropic order.” While the foundation’s sprawling grantmaking spans many issue areas, it is known in particular for deep investments in combating global diseases, gender equity, and economic inclusion and development. Since November 2024, the Gates Foundation has been rethinking how to approach grantmaking in light of more recent funding cuts to public and global health. IP’s David Callahan covers some of the recent shifts at Gates. In May 2025, Bill Gates announced that he will be sunsetting the Gates Foundation by 2045, giving away $200 billion and doubling grants to improve “lives around the world.” This acceleration is a major shift from the foundation’s original plan to sunset several decades after its founders’ deaths. How the foundation will implement this acceleration, despite a brief outline of goals, remains forthcoming.
The foundation is transparent about its grantmaking and financials. However, Gates takes a proactive approach to grantmaking, relying on an internal process to identify prospective grantees. In a limited number of cases where the foundation wants to cast a wider net, it issues a request for proposals (RFPs). In general, this is not an accessible funder for new grantees, and the bulk of Gates’ giving consists of large, multi-year commitments to established organizations, including some of the world’s best-known NGOs, universities, and U.N.-affiliated organizations. While smaller organizations with strong track records stand a chance here, they may have to engage in some strenuous networking to get noticed.
To learn more about Bill Gates’s investments in climate, see Breakthrough Energy Foundation. Separately, Bill Gates also started a company called TerraPower to “bring safe, clean, next-generation nuclear technology to life.” Gates plans to reinvest funds from these ventures back into the Gates Foundation. For information about Melinda French Gates and her philanthropy since leaving the Gates Foundation, see IP’s profile of Pivotal.
PROFILE: The Gates Foundation as cofounded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. The couple divorced in 2021, and French Gates stepped down as co-chair of the foundation in May 2024. Headquartered in Seattle, the foundation was initially formed as a merger between two pre-existing Gates philanthropies, the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation.
The foundation’s early focus areas included education in the U.S. and global disease eradication. Over the years, its global programs have expanded significantly. Today, The Gates Foundation is the largest charitable organization in the United States by far, with an endowment of around $70 billion. The foundation defines itself as a “nonprofit fighting poverty, disease and inequity around the world,” and its mission is to “create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.”
Gates is a Giving Pledge signatory who has pledged to give away “virtually all” of his wealth. As Bill Gates’ personal fortune continues to balloon, the foundation’s coffers likewise grow. In 2022, Gates announced that by 2026, the Gates Foundation’s annual grantmaking budget will be $9 billion, and in May 2025, the foundation committed to giving away $200 billion by 2045, when it intends to shut down permanently.
- Gates conducts grantmaking at both the national and international levels and lists four broad impact areas: Health, Gender Equality, Global Development, and Education.
- Its U.S. program centers on education, economic mobility and the state of Washington.
- Globally, the foundation runs several overlapping initiatives for global development in the areas of health, economic development and education.
- In addition to these ongoing strategies, the foundation’s spend down announcement lists “three primary goals” toward which it intends to “make as much progress as possible” before 2045: to help end infant and maternal mortality; to broadly prevent deadly infectious diseases for the next generations; and to lift millions of people out of poverty by putting them on a path to prosperity.
- Gates has programs in over 130 countries, with “foundation representatives based in key regions,” including Africa, China, India, East Asia, Europe, Middle East, and North America.
- It is worth mentioning that, as one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world, this funder’s work exceeds its named programs and initiatives, as it addresses needs and causes across most of the globe through partnerships with governments, research institutions and NGOs.
Global Program
Grants for Global Development and Health
The foundation’s global funding encompasses four main giving areas, which include Global Development, Global Growth and Opportunity, Global Health, and Policy and Advocacy. Funding here often intersects with sustainable farming and food, journalism, finance, science and medical research. Learn more about each area of international development below:
The Global Development program “focuses on improving the delivery of high-impact health products and services to the world’s poorest communities and helps countries expand access to health coverage.”
Emergency Response giving targets “regions affected by natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and complex emergencies” and works broadly to provide aid and improve local capacity for response. Grantees of this subprogram include the United States Fund for UNICEF, the Save the Children Federation and Lutheran World Relief, among many others.
Support for Global Health Agencies and Funds helps health organizations around the world stay on track to meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals for global health. Key grantee partners here include the WHO, UNICEF and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, among others.
Immunization is another main area of focus, with grants working to “reach children, adolescents, and adults in lower-income countries with the vaccines they need to live a life free from vaccine-preventable diseases.” Giving focuses on areas of the world with the highest rates of children that are not immunized and target preventable diseases including, but not limited to, pneumonia, rotavirus, polio, measles and cholera. In 2025, Gates confirmed his dedication to Gavi, the foundation’s largest grantee, announcing that the Gates Foundation would be providing $1.6 billion over the next five years.
A separate subinitiative works to “eradicate polio worldwide.” Support mainly goes to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).
The foundation also makes grants for Primary Health Care, with the goal of “strengthening the quality, accessibility, and efficiency of primary health care systems.” Strategies for this giving include the expansion of existing health infrastructure, program evaluation, testing promising primary health care innovations and expanding health services through partnerships and collaborations.
Gates’ Global Growth and Opportunity giving area “focuses on creating and scaling market-based innovations to stimulate inclusive and sustainable economic growth.”
A core focus area is Agricultural Development. Giving focuses on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where grants support “farmers and governments […] seeking a sustainable, inclusive agricultural transformation.” Specific areas of investment include “tools and technologies” for farmers, innovative income supports for smallholder producers of food and “efforts to develop more effective systems for delivering products and services to smallholder farmers.”
Overlapping with its agricultural giving, Gates prioritizes Nutrition and helping more than one billion people around the world gain “access to the nutrition and healthy diets they need to survive and thrive.” Strategies for this grantmaking include food fortification, sustainable food production and distribution systems, and nutrition interventions for mothers, infants and young children.
The subprogram for Inclusive Financial Systems works to “expand access to digital financial services” to people living in the world’s poorest countries. Priorities of this program include support for the development and adoption of digital finance infrastructures, the establishment of regulatory systems for digital platforms and the inclusion and empowerment of women.
The foundation also invests in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that have lagged behind in the development of sewer systems and safe sanitation. This program emphasizes innovation and, in 2011, it launched a Reinvent the Toilet Challenge that resulted in systems that are now commercially available. Grants and investments have also gone to public and private organizations working to expand inclusive indoor plumbing and public sewer systems in urban and rural areas.
Grants for Global Education mainly support initiatives working “[t]o improve basic literacy and numeracy skills among children of primary school age in sub-Saharan Africa and India.” Strategies include data collection and analysis, policy development and advocacy, teacher development, curricular solutions and capacity building for effective education systems and providers.
- The Digital Public Infrastructure subprogram works to “encourage and equip low- and middle-income countries to adopt safe and inclusive digital public infrastructure to advance the global Sustainable Development Goals.” The program’s goal is to use digital identity, payment, and exchange systems to increase economic opportunities and social services.
The Global Health giving area appears to be the foundation’s largest and most comprehensive program. This far-reaching initiative “aims to reduce inequities in health by developing new tools and strategies to reduce the burden of infectious disease and the leading causes of child mortality in developing countries.” The foundation’s global health work has received criticism in its approaches.
Grants for Discovery & Translational Sciences work to “[t]o catalyze innovation for the discovery and translation of transformational solutions to global health inequity.” Grantmaking targets “potentially transformative products” including those “with a high risk of failure but also the potential to create truly disruptive change.”
In addition to supporting leading researchers and institutes around the world, the foundation bankrolls the Global Health Discovery Collaboratory and the Gates Medical Research Institute.
The Gates Foundation runs significant subprograms for the prevention, treatment and eradication of specific diseases. These include HIV, Malaria, Neglected Tropical Diseases, Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, and Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases. A separate and significant subprogram is devoted to Vaccine Development and Surveillance. Look for these programs to expand in the coming years, as disease eradication is a major part of the foundation’s decades-long sunsetting plan.
Notably, it was the Gates Foundation that provided seed funding for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002. Since its founding, this massive international financing partnership has dispersed $60 billon to fight these diseases. The Gates Foundation has continued to support this work in myriad ways.
The Accelerator subprogram aims to “conceive, design, test, and position fundamentally novel platform technologies” with “breakthrough potential in service of the foundation’s global health mission.”
Similarly, the Integrated Development subprogram “accelerate[s] the development, regulatory approval, and manufacturing of innovative products and enabling platforms that advance global health.” A significant portion of this work focuses on drug development and reducing the amount of time involved in bringing effective and affordable treatments to “the people who need them most.” Areas of focus have included regulatory systems, manufacturing, quality controls and “[c]ontraceptive technology research and development.”
Gates’ Institute for Disease Modeling works broadly to improve global health and eradicate diseases “by developing, using, and sharing computational modeling tools and promoting quantitative decision-making.” Strategies for this work include data modeling, statistical analysis and deep collaboration with the global health research community.
A separate global development initiative focuses on Policy and Advocacy to build strategic relationships” that will help the foundation reach its global health and development goals.
A subinitiative for Development Policy and Finance works to “harness the power of finance and economics to address poverty and inequality.” In addition to grantmaking in this area, the initiative engages in “analytic and advisory services” and develops partnerships and collaborations with key players both internationally and for individual countries of interest.
The Gates Foundation’s Global Media Partnerships program supports an array of public interest media outlets and initiatives with the goal of ensuring “reliable, consistent reporting on critical global health and development issues that disproportionally affect the world’s poorest people.” Grants prioritize sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S., Europe and Japan. Grantees of this program are required to demonstrate journalistic professionalism in “providing fact-based information and committing to the pursuit of truth” and maintaining “creative and editorial independence.” Media grantees include NPR’s Goats and Soda blog, Kenya’s Daily Nation, the Associated Press, The Guardian and the International Center for Journalists.
A subprogram for Philanthropic Partnerships works to “inspire and enable more informed and intentional generosity by all.” Specifically, the foundation supports “research, innovation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing” amongst philanthropic organizations around the world.
The Gates Foundation also works globally in the area of Tobacco Control, aiming to “reduce tobacco-related death and disease in low- and middle-income countries by preventing the initiation of new smokers, decreasing overall tobacco use, and reducing exposure to secondhand smoke.” Key strategies include “policy intervention” and “social marketing” to increase knowledge and awareness about the dangers of tobacco use.
Grants for Women, Girls, Reproductive and Maternal Health
The Gates Foundation’s global Gender Equality initiative “works to ensure women and girls in Africa and South Asia can enjoy good health, make their own choices, earn their own money, and be leaders in their societies.” Grantmaking for women and girls overlaps with some of the foundation’s other global grantmaking goals and priorities, particularly in areas related to health and economic development. This is a major portfolio within the foundation, with a commitment of $2.1 billion to gender equality through 2026. Giving in these areas will likely increase substantially in the coming years in response to vast reductions of funding to U.S.A.I.D. for programs relating to maternal and infant health.
The foundation names the following priority areas for its giving:
Family Planning grants aim to “empower women and girls to take charge of their own reproductive health, enable them to make informed decisions about family planning, and ensure their access to contraceptive options that meet their needs.” The foundation has committed $300 million per year through 2030 in this area, with funding focusing on contraceptive access, quality family planning services, advocacy, research and collaboration with governments including India, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and Pakistan.
Maternal, Infant & Child Health is a large program working to “ensure that women and their newborns remain healthy before, during, and after childbirth, including by supporting the development, testing, and scale up of innovative solutions to address underlying vulnerabilities that contribute to poor health.” In 2023, the foundation committed $370 million to the program through 2027.
In a “joint philanthropic commitment of nearly $600 million” with ELMA, the Gates Foundation supports the Beginnings Fund to “provide quality care to 34 million mothers and babies and prevent 300,000 avoidable maternal and infant deaths by 2030 in up to 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
- In August 2025, Gates committed $2.5 billion over five years “to catalyze innovation in maternal, menstrual, gynecological, and sexual health for women globally.” This comes in response to the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid programs. (Read more about this in Inside Philanthropy’s reporting here.)
The Women in Leadership program seeks to expand “women’s full and effective participation in leadership at all levels of decision-making in economic and public life.” The program focuses on “mid-career women” in the fields of health, law and economics, and strategies include the empowerment of individuals, “organizational change” and “societal impact.”
A related area of interest is Women’s Economic Empowerment. This program makes grants to “increase women’s economic opportunities by supporting efforts to help them generate and control their own incomes.” Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the foundation has set a goal of “generating opportunities for at least 80 million low-income women […] that increase their incomes by more than 30% by 2030.”
The final subprogram of Gates’ Gender Equality initiative concerns Women’s Health Innovations. The goal of this giving area is to “facilitate the development of innovative health products and widen the innovation ecosystem to address conditions that disproportionately affect the lives of women in low- and middle-income countries.”
- Several strategic initiatives build on the foundation’s existing strengths in data, health, and development.
U.S. Program
Grants for Education
Grantmaking for Education in the U.S. stems from several subprograms and spans early childhood, K-12 and post-secondary education.
A subprogram for educational Data aims to “ensure that educators, families, and policymakers across the United States have the information they need to help students succeed in school and in life.”
Grants support “efforts to collect and expand access to student data” with an eye to security and privacy.
The program also currently supports the development of comprehensive data systems at the state level to “serve as exemplars for other states” and to help educational researchers and curriculum designers create and improve evidence-based teaching methods.
Early Learning Solutions is the subprogram for early childhood education. Grantmaking here works nationally to improve “access to high-quality, affordable, personalized early learning opportunities.”
Overlapping with the data subprogram, grants for early learning have supported efforts to “measure the quality of learning environments” and collect data that will “accurately inform early childhood policies.”
A significant portion of funding here also supports “pre-K professional development, mentoring, and coaching.”
The K-12 Education subprogram works to improve K-12 learning with a strong focus on mathematics as “the cornerstone skill for academic success and greater opportunities in the workforce.”
Specifically areas of interest include the improvement of instructional materials, methods and teacher preparation.
The foundation prioritizes equity in this work, noting that Black, Latino and low-income students too often “experience math as a barrier to success rather than as a gateway.”
Pathways is the Gates Foundation’s college and career readiness program. Grantmaking works to support students “in their transition from high school to college, career, and beyond,” with a strong focus on “Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty.” In addition to student supports, the program works to forge better connections between high school curricula, college expectations and viable career skills.
The Post-Secondary Success giving area aims to “dramatically improve student outcomes and ensure that race, ethnicity, and income are not predictors of postsecondary success.” A main thrust of the program is collaborating with colleges, universities, policymakers and others to provide both support and institutional innovation to “help students identify and get on a path to a certificate or degree, stay on that path, and ensure that they are learning along the way.”
Finally, the Gates Foundation runs a separate initiative for Washington State, where it “help[s] more students […] enroll in a postsecondary program after high school.” A multi-year commitment of $75 million supports “schools, colleges and community organizations” that share the foundation’s goal of increasing students pursuing higher education.
- The Gates Foundation’s U.S. education grantees include Rice University, Unbounded Learning, the Fund for Public Schools, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Learning, Inc., “a leading provider of K-12 education technology, curriculum, and professional learning solutions.”
- Gates also makes U.S.-based education grants via the Gates Scholarship, available on a separate site. This program was established in 2017 to help students from low-income backgrounds achieve their potential. Recipients have access to support and resources beyond the scholarship itself.
Grants for Economic Development and Opportunity
The Gates Foundation’s U.S. program for Economic Mobility and Opportunity aims to “help the U.S. economic system better meet the needs of those experiencing poverty and significantly increase their opportunities to achieve economic success.” The program focuses on “the 47 million people in the U.S. ages 16 to 64 whose annual incomes are below 200% of the federal poverty level” and collaborates with multiple stakeholders to create conditions in which low-income people can “achieve long-term economic stability.”
To these ends, the Gates Foundation collaborated with the Urban Institute and others in the creation of Workrise, “a national platform that funds research and data collection on the labor market and shares promising insights, practices, and policies that can help increase economic opportunity for low-income workers.” Other grantees in the areas of work and opportunity include Washington’s Opportunity at Work, Worklife Partnership, Innovations for Poverty Action and Code for America Labs, which helps state and local governments support low-income residents connection to public services and resources.
Important Grant Details:
Gates Foundation grants range between $5,000 and $1 million, but can go up to $100 million or higher, in some cases. Most grants are awarded in amounts of $100,000 or more. The foundation has given away over $100 billion since it was founded.
Gates grantmaking is prolific and far surpasses the issues and areas articulated on its website. However, a majority of grants invest in health and global work. Grantmaking occurs across both the U.S., predominately in California and Washington state, as well as across the globe, most often in China, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the United Kingdom, among many other countries.
Gates tends to make large, multi-year commitments to large NGOs, government agencies, education and research institutions, and U.N.-and WHO-affiliated organizations. However, smaller organizations with strong track records do stand a chance here.
- Large increases in funding, especially in the area of global health, are expected in the coming years, based on the foundation’s plans to sunset by 2045.
This funder does not generally accept proposals for funding, but it does occasionally post RFPs for specific projects, often concerning data collection, analysis and program evaluations.
Additional information about Gates’s grantmaking is available at its How We Work page and its searchable Committed Grants database.
Program pages feature profiles of team members and leadership, making it possible to network with relevant staff.
- Submit general inquiries to the Gates Foundation via its contact page, which also provides links to the foundation’s social media accounts. The foundation’s phone number is listed as (206) 709-3100.
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