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Tag: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

  • Bill Gates Calls US Aid Cuts a ‘Paradox’ Amid Historic Global Health Progress

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    Bill Gates says recent breakthroughs could save millions—but only if governments maintain support. Photo by Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images

    Funding for global health is shrinking rapidly amid steep foreign aid cuts by the Trump administration. At the same time, however, scientific breakthroughs are making today’s health innovations more promising than ever. These two realities amount to “the paradox of this moment,” Bill Gates wrote in an op-ed for Time Magazine published yesterday (Sep. 18).

    At such a critical juncture, the Microsoft co-founder is doubling down on global health through the Gates Foundation—while urging governments not to abandon their commitments. “The choices they make now—whether to go forward with proposed steep cuts to health aid, or to give the world’s children the chance they deserve to live a healthy life—will determine what kind of future we leave the next generation,” wrote Gates.

    Gates has repeatedly criticized the Trump administration’s pullback from global health programs, including cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and HIV relief initiative PEPFAR. Earlier this year, he denounced the role of Elon Musk, then head of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), for contributing to “the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”

    The retreat comes at a time of unprecedented progress. In 2000, more than 10 million children died before the age of five, Gates noted in the op-ed. That number has since fallen by half, and the philanthropist believes it could be halved again within two decades—if funding is sustained or increased.

    The Gates Foundation is committing heavily to that future. In May, Gates announced the foundation, with an endowment of $77 billion, will wind down by 2045 after distributing $200 billion in grants. Much of that money will target preventable maternal and child deaths, as well as diseases like polio, malaria and guinea worm. Since its launch in 2000, the foundation has already given away more than $100 billion, much of it to health initiatives.

    But philanthropy alone can’t replace government support. “The fact remains: we won’t get there without rich countries giving a small fraction of their budgets,” said Gates.

    He has spent much of this year lobbying lawmakers and the Trump administration to protect aid programs. In recent testimony to Congress, he warned that a sharp reduction in U.S. funding could cause the deaths of an additional eight million children by 2040. He has also personally met with Trump, urging him to scale back the severity of cuts. “If you make a very modest cut, we’ll make sure that the money is well spent and there’s no additional deaths,” Gates told TIME in an interview, which was also published yesterday. “But if you have the kind of cuts that are, in fact, the reality today… there will be millions of additional deaths.”

    The urgency will soon be tested. In November, the Global Fund, a financing partnership founded in 2002 to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, will hold its next replenishment conference. The U.S. has contributed $27.6 billion to the fund to date, making it its largest donor. Gates said his foundation will announce its own contribution next week.

    The upcoming conference will show “just how high of a priority this is for countries,” Gates wrote. “I’ll be interested to see what governments bring to the table.”

    Bill Gates Calls US Aid Cuts a ‘Paradox’ Amid Historic Global Health Progress

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Bill Gates Launches $1M A.I. Competition to Tackle Alzheimer’s

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    This isn’t the first time Bill Gates has poured money into Alzheimer’s research. Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images

    More than 7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease—a figure expected to rise as life expectancies increase. To help accelerate progress, Bill Gates and a coalition of partners are backing a new A.I. competition designed to spur breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s and related dementia research.

    Unveiled today (Aug. 19) by the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative),  the competition will award a $1 million prize to a team that successfully utilizes agentic A.I. to develop innovative solutions. The resulting tools will be made publicly available through the AD Data Initiative’s online research environment.

    “The Alzheimer’s Insights A.I. Prize is our call to the global innovation system to act with urgency,” said Niranjan Bose, interim executive director of the AD Data Initiative, in a statement. “A.I. has the potential to revolutionize the pace and scale of dementia research—providing an opportunity we cannot afford to miss out on, especially with so many lives at risk,” added Bose, who also serves as managing director for health and life sciences at Gates Ventures, the family office funding the competition.

    For Gates, the mission is deeply personal. He helped launch the AD Data Initiative in 2020, just months after his father died at age 94 from the disease. “We are closer than ever before to a world where no one has to watch someone they love suffer from this awful disease,” said Gates in a Father’s Day post this year, calling for faster progress in Alzheimer’s research.

    How can A.I. help?

    Alzheimer’s is a particularly complex disease, with multiple potential causes and a web of biological pathways that have long stymied researchers. Agentic A.I. is well-suited to tackling these challenges because it can autonomously analyze large amounts of data and catch insights that human researchers might miss, according to the AD Data Initiative.

    Beyond data analysis, A.I. could also transform the very nature of Alzheimer’s research. “A.I. is opening the door for a shift from reactive to predictive research—identifying novel biomarkers of early disease patterns, optimizing clinical trial designs, and revealing unexpected opportunities for drug creation and repurposing,” said Gregory Moore, senior advisor at both Gates Ventures and the AD Data Initiative, in a statement.

    Over the years, Gates has poured billions into public health initiatives via his charitable foundation. But his Alzheimer’s work has largely come from his personal fortune, which currently stands at around $118.3 billion. His donations include a $50 million gift to support novel treatments, another $50 million toward clinical trials and early detection and $30 million to create an initiative focused on improving diagnostics.

    Now, with the new competition, Gates is widening the call for innovation. Applications open today for A.I. and machine learning engineers, computational biomedicine experts, tech companies, clinical specialists and Alzheimer’s researchers. Semi-finalists will be announced in December, with finalists competing next March at the Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease Conference in Copenhagen.

    Bill Gates Launches $1M A.I. Competition to Tackle Alzheimer’s

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    Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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  • Fortified bouillon cubes are seen as a way to curb malnutrition in Africa

    Fortified bouillon cubes are seen as a way to curb malnutrition in Africa

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    IBADAN, Nigeria (AP) — In her cramped, dimly lit kitchen, Idowu Bello leans over a gas cooker while stirring a pot of eba, the thick starchy West African staple made from cassava root. Kidney problems and chronic exhaustion forced the 56-year-old Nigerian woman to retire from teaching, and she switches between cooking with gas or over a wood fire depending on the fuel she can afford.

    Financial constraints also limit the food Bello has on hand even though doctors have recommended a nutrient-rich diet both to improve her weakening health and to help her teenage daughter, Fatima, grow. Along with eba, on the menu today is melon soup with ponmo, an inexpensive condiment made from dried cowhide.

    “Fish, meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables and even milk are costly these days,” Bello, 56, said, her lean face etched with worry.

    If public health advocates and the Nigerian government have their way, malnourished households in the West African nation soon will have a simple ingredient available to improve their intake of key vitamins and minerals. Government regulators on Tuesday are launching a code of standards for adding iron, zinc, folic acid and vitamin B12 to bouillon cubes at minimum levels recommended by experts.

    While the standards will be voluntary for manufacturers for now, their adoption could help accelerate progress against diets deficient in essential micronutrients, or what is known in nutrition and public health circles as “hidden hunger.” Fortified bouillon cubes could avert up to 16.6 million cases of anemia and up to 11,000 deaths from neural tube defects in Nigeria, according to a new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    “Regardless of economic situation or income level, everyone uses seasoning cubes,” Bello said as she unwrapped and dropped one in her melon soup.

    A growing and multipronged problem

    Making do with smaller portions and less nutritious foods is common among many Nigerian households, according to a recent government survey on dietary intake and micronutrients. The survey estimated that 79% of Nigerian households are food insecure.

    The climate crisis, which has seen extreme heat and unpredictable rainfall patterns hobble agriculture in Africa’s troubled Sahel region, will worsen the problem, with several million children expected to experience growth problems due to malnutrition between now and 2050, according to the Gates Foundation report released Tuesday.

    “Farmlands are destroyed, you have a shortage of food, the system is strained, leading to inflation making it difficult for the people to access foods, including animal-based proteins,” Augustine Okoruwa, a regional program manager at Helen Keller Intl, said, highlighting the link between malnutrition and climate change.

    Dietary deficiencies of the micronutrients the government wants added to bouillon cubes already have caused a public health crisis in Nigeria, including a high prevalence of anemia in women of child-bearing age, neural tube defects in newborn babies and stunted growth among children, according to Okoruwa.

    Helen Keller Intl, a New York-based nonprofit that works to address the causes of blindness and malnutrition, has partnered with the Gates Foundation and businesses and government agencies in Africa to promote food fortification.

    In Nigeria, recent economic policies such as the cancellation of gasoline subsidies are driving the country’s worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, further deepening food hardship for the low-income earners who form the majority of the country’s working population.

    Globally, nearly 3 billion people are unable to access healthy diets, 71% of them in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization.

    The large-scale production of fortified foods would unlock a new way to “increase micronutrients in the food staples of low-income countries to create resilience for vulnerable families,” the Gates Foundation said.

    Bouillon cubes as the vehicle

    Bouillon cubes — those small blocks of evaporated meat or vegetable extracts and seasonings that typically are used to flavor soups and stews — are widely consumed in many African countries, nearing 100% household penetration in countries like Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon, according to a study by Helen Keller Intl.

    That makes the cubes the “most cost-effective way” to add minerals and vitamins to the diets of millions of people, Okoruwa said.

    No Nigerian manufacturers already include the four micronutrients at the recommended levels, but there is industry interest.

    Sweet Nutrition, located in Ota, near Lagos in Nigeria’s southwest, started adding iron to some of its products in 2017. Marketing manager Roop Kumar told The Associated Press it was a “voluntary exercise” to contribute to public health.

    “But we are taking trials and looking at further fortification” with the launch of the new regulatory framework, Kumar said.

    Although NASCON Allied Industries, a Nigerian company that produces table salt and seasoning cubes, currently does not make products with any of the four micronutrients, quality control manager Josephine Afolayan said fortification is a priority.

    “If we’re successful, that would mean that the fortified bouillon seasoning cubes in so many Nigerian dishes would also contribute to improving the micronutrient content of the dishes in my country,” Ladidi Bako-Aiyegbusi, the director of nutrition at Nigeria’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, wrote in the Gates Foundation report.

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    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.

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    Compliance and science

    Despite the promise of enriching a product that most people have in their pantries, some challenges need to be addressed. One is the “campaign of calumny” in a region where science-led interventions in the food sector have sometimes faced resistance from interest groups, Okoruwa said.

    Educating people about the benefits of fortified products may help counter any possible disinformation campaign, said Yunusa Mohammed, the head of the food group at the Standards Organization of Nigeria, the government regulator for consumer products.

    There is also the need to make fortified cubes affordable for struggling households like Bello’s, where a pile of firewood she uses to cook outdoors on an open flame is stacked against a wall.

    “What we can do is to influence the government and industry on rebates on the importation of raw materials as a public health intervention,” Mohammed said.

    Food fortification is not new in Nigeria. Most of the salt consumed in the country is iodized, and products such as wheat flour, cooking oil and sugar are fortified with vitamin A by law. But the requirement for adding the four vitamins and minerals to bouillon is the most comprehensive fortification regulation to date.

    Although Nigerian companies do not have to enrich their seasoning cubes yet, experts think setting standards that producers must follow if they choose to will make a difference.

    A working group involving representatives from companies, regulatory agencies, research groups and development organizations is in place to accelerate voluntary compliance.

    “Ultimately, we will make the bouillon fortification mandatory after seeing the acceptance of the voluntary regulations in the industry,” Mohammed said.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • An ancient African tree is providing a new ‘superfood’ but local harvesters are barely surviving

    An ancient African tree is providing a new ‘superfood’ but local harvesters are barely surviving

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    Since childhood, Loveness Bhitoni has collected fruit from the gigantic baobab trees surrounding her homestead in Zimbabwe to add variety to the family’s staple corn and millet diet. The 50-year-old Bhitoni never saw them as a source of cash, until now.

    Climate change-induced droughts have decimated her crops. Meanwhile, the world has a growing appetite for the fruit of the drought-resistant baobab as a natural health food.

    Bhitoni wakes before dawn to go foraging for baobab fruit, sometimes walking barefoot though hot, thorny landscapes with the risk of wildlife attacks. She gathers sacks of the hard-shelled fruit from the ancient trees and sells them on to industrial food processors or individual buyers from the city.

    The baobab trade, which took root in her area in 2018, would previously supplement things like children’s school fees and clothing for locals of the small town of Kotwa in northeastern Zimbabwe. Now, it’s a matter of survival following the latest devastating drought in southern Africa, worsened by the El Niño weather phenomenon.

    “We are only able to buy corn and salt,” Bhitoni said after a long day’s harvest. “Cooking oil is a luxury because the money is simply not enough. Sometimes I spend a month without buying a bar of soap. I can’t even talk of school fees or children’s clothes.”

    The global market for baobab products has spiked, turning rural African areas with an abundance of the trees into source markets. The trees, known for surviving even under severe conditions like drought or fire, need more than 20 years to start producing fruit and aren’t cultivated but foraged.

    Tens of thousands of rural people like Bhitoni have emerged to feed the need. The African Baobab Alliance, with members across the continent’s baobab producing countries, projects that more than 1 million rural African women could reap economic benefits from the fruit, which remains fresh for long periods because of its thick shell.

    The alliance’s members train locals on food safety. They also encourage people to collect the fruit, which can grow to 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide and 21 inches (53 centimeters) long, from the ground rather than the hazardous work of climbing the enormous, thick-trunked trees. Many, especially men, still do, however.

    Native to the African continent, the baobab is known as the “tree of life” for its resilience and is found from South Africa to Kenya to Sudan and Senegal. Zimbabwe has about 5 million of the trees, according to Zimtrade, a government export agency.

    But the baobab’s health benefits long went unnoticed elsewhere.

    Gus Le Breton, a pioneer of the industry, remembers the early days.

    “Baobab did not develop into a globally traded and known superfood by accident,” said Le Breton, recalling years of regulatory, safety and toxicology testing to convince authorities in the European Union and United States to approve it.

    “It was ridiculous because the baobab fruit has been consumed in Africa safely for thousands and thousands of years,” said Le Breton, an ethnobotanist specializing in African plants used for food and medicine.

    Studies have shown that the baobab fruit has several health benefits as an antioxidant, and a source of vitamin C and essential minerals such as zinc, potassium and magnesium.

    The U.S. legalized the import of baobab powder as a food and beverage ingredient in 2009, a year after the EU. But getting foreign taste buds to accept the sharp, tart-like taste took repeated trips to Western and Asian countries.

    “No one had ever heard of it, they didn’t know how to pronounce its name. It took us a long time,” Le Breton said. The tree is pronounced BAY-uh-bab.

    Together with China, the U.S. and Europe now account for baobab powder’s biggest markets. The Dutch government’s Center for the Promotion of Imports says the global market could reach $10 billion by 2027. Le Breton says his association projects a 200% growth in global demand between 2025 and 2030, and is also looking at increasing consumption among Africa’s increasingly health-conscious urbanites.

    Companies such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi have opened product lines promoting baobab ingredients. In Europe, the powder is hyped by some as having “real star qualities” and is used to flavor beverages, cereals, yogurt, snack bars and other items.

    A packet of a kilogram (2.2 pound) of baobab powder sells for around 27 euros (about $30) in Germany. In the United Kingdom, a 100-milliliter (3.38-ounce) bottle of baobab beauty oil can fetch 25 pounds (about $33).

    The growing industry is on display at a processing plant in Zimbabwe, where baobab pulp is bagged separately from the seeds. Each bag has a tag tracing it to the harvester who sold it. Outside the factory, the hard shells are turned into biochar, an ash given to farmers for free to make organic compost.

    Harvesters like Bhitoni say they can only dream of affording the commercial products the fruit becomes. She earns 17 cents for every kilogram of the fruit and she can spend up to eight hours a day walking through the sunbaked savanna. She has exhausted the trees nearby.

    “The fruit is in demand, but the trees did not produce much this year, so sometimes I return without filling up a single sack,” Bhitoni said. “I need five sacks to get enough money to buy a 10-kilogram (22-pound) packet of cornmeal.”

    Some individual buyers who feed a growing market for the powder in Zimbabwe’s urban areas prey on residents’ drought-induced hunger, offering cornmeal in exchange for seven 20-liter (around 4-gallon) buckets of cracked fruit, she said.

    “People have no choice because they have nothing,” said Kingstone Shero, the local councilor. “The buyers are imposing prices on us and we don’t have the capacity to resist because of hunger.”

    Le Breton sees better prices ahead as the market expands.

    “I think that the market has grown significantly, (but) I don’t think it has grown exponentially. It’s been fairly steady growth,” he said. “I believe at some point that it will increase in value as well. And at that point, then I think that the harvesters will really start to be earning some serious income from the harvesting and sale of this really truly remarkable fruit.”.

    Zimtrade, the government export agency, has lamented the low prices paid to baobab pickers and says it’s looking at partnering with rural women to set up processing plants.

    The difficult situation is likely to continue due to a lack of negotiating power by fruit pickers, some of them children, said Prosper Chitambara, a development economist based in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

    On a recent day, Bhitoni walked from one baobab tree to the next. She carefully examined each fruit before leaving the smaller ones for wild animals such as baboons and elephants to eat — an age-old tradition.

    “It is tough work, but the buyers don’t even understand this when we ask them to increase prices,” she said.

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    For more news on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse

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    The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Melinda French Gates: How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome | Entrepreneur

    Melinda French Gates: How I Overcame Imposter Syndrome | Entrepreneur

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    Even the most prominent business figures have felt imposter syndrome.

    Philanthropist Melinda French Gates sat down with Jay Shetty on the “On Purpose” podcast this week to talk about her career and personal life, namely moments where she’s had to find grace and embrace a sense of imperfections while on her journey.

    Related: Melinda French Gates Resigns as Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

    French Gates recalled her time running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and admitted that she “felt like an imposter for the first 10 years” and never felt qualified to “speak credibly” about the foundation’s work because she wasn’t professionally trained in global health policy or medicine.

    However, one specific incident brought her to an epiphany that changed the way she approached her work and her role.

    “Someone actually inside the Foundation who was working for me at the time came to me and wanted me to speak out on something and I said ‘No, no, I don’t feel like I know enough,’” French Gates explained. “And this woman said to me ‘Are you kidding? Just look at all the traveling you have done … all the knowledge you’ve amassed?’”

    She said that the employee gave her a multitude of examples of how she was qualified — from the different communities she’s visited to the doctors and scientists she’s worked with, all the while amassing years of direct experience in the field.

    Related: Melinda French Gates Reveals Her Next Move After Leaving Gates Foundation

    “I could speak on behalf of so many of these women that I’d met and who’d invited me into their homes or shown me the tough circumstances of their lives,” French Gates explained. “If they’ve spoken to me, I need to speak their truths into the world … I do know enough. I’ll never know everything, no one will ever know everything on the history of the Earth, but I know enough to know what I know deeply at a core level and to speak those truths.”

    French Gates formally resigned as Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in May, noting that under the terms of her departure, she would still have an additional $12.5 billion to spend on philanthropic work moving forward.

    “This is not a decision I came to lightly,” she wrote in a statement on X at the time. “The time is right for me to move forward into the next chapter of my philanthropy.”

    Days later, she announced that she would be donating $1 billion over the next two years to organizations advocating for women.

    Melinda French Gates’ net worth as of Thursday afternoon was an estimated $13.4 billion.

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    Emily Rella

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  • Buffett donates over $750 million to his family charities

    Buffett donates over $750 million to his family charities

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    OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett donated more than $750 million in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the four foundations run by his family Wednesday, but unlike his annual gifts to charity each summer, the recipients didn’t include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

    Buffett has been making annual donations to the same five charities every year since 2006 when he unveiled a plan to give away his fortune over time, with the Gates Foundation receiving the biggest donations. Wednesday’s donations mark the first time the 92-year-old has made a second major gift within the same year.

    A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed Buffett gave 1.5 million Class B shares in the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate he leads to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife. He also gave 300,000 Class B shares apiece to the three foundations run by his children: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.

    In June, he gave 11 million Class B shares to the Gates Foundation, 1.1 million B shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and 770,218 shares apiece to his children’s three foundations.

    It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the new donations this week, and Buffett didn’t immediately respond Wednesday to questions about them. The Gates Foundation and the Buffett family foundations that received the gifts also didn’t immediately respond to questions.

    The only other major change Buffett has made to his giving plans over the years came a decade ago when he significantly increased the amount pledged to the foundations his children run because he was pleased with what they had done with his money.

    The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation keeps a low profile, but over the years it has been a major supporter of abortion rights, making large gifts to Planned Parenthood and other groups. Buffett hasn’t announced any changes in his giving plans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

    Susie Buffett, 69, uses her Sherwood Foundation to strengthen early childhood education and support a number of projects around Buffett’s hometown of Omaha where she also lives. Howard Buffett, 67, is helping farmers in impoverished nations produce more and working to end world hunger with his namesake foundation. Peter Buffett, 64, has dedicated his NoVo Foundation to empowering women and girls worldwide through education, collaboration and economic development to end violence against women.

    Even after these latest gifts, Buffett still controls more than 31% of Berkshire’s voting power.

    Berkshire Hathaway is an eclectic conglomerate that owns more than 90 companies including BNSF railroad, Geico insurance, several major utilities and an assortment of manufacturing and retail firms including Precision Castparts, Dairy Queen and Helzberg Diamonds. In addition to the companies it owns outright, Berkshire owns major investments in Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola and other companies.

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  • Gates Foundation boosts GivingTuesday with $10M donation

    Gates Foundation boosts GivingTuesday with $10M donation

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    NEW YORK — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $10 million to the organization that grew out of the hashtag #GivingTuesday in part to fund a database of charitable giving and other acts of generosity.

    GivingTuesday, the organization, has helped people realize there is a lot they can give, said foundation co-founder Melinda French Gates in an interview.

    “Whether people are giving their voice, their time, their expertise or their money, and given that it was the ten year anniversary of GivingTuesday, it seemed like the right time to step up with another commitment,” French Gates said.

    Asha Curran, GivingTuesday’s CEO, described the foundation as a thought partner in addition to being a funder.

    “It’s a really wonderful thing to see the partnering of big philanthropy and grassroots generosity, that those things don’t have to live in separate worlds and be viewed as totally separate things,” Curran said.

    The new gift announced Tuesday also represents the Gates Foundation’s ongoing efforts encouraging people to give. The Giving Pledge, which the Gates’ founded with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, asks billionaires to donate more than half of their wealth to charitable causes within their lifetimes, while GivingTuesday seeks to mobilize everyone else.

    “We believe philanthropy is the right thing to do and that anybody can do it,” said French Gates in an interview. “And so, it’s more making it a societal norm, quite frankly, that you give something back.”

    GivingTuesday started in 2012 as a project of the 92nd Street Y and became an independent nonprofit in 2020. It now convenes a network of people who run campaigns for communities around the world, adapted to relevant holidays and giving traditions.

    Most people still associate the organization with the now-familiar flood of emails and other solicitations for charitable donations that pour in on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., which Curran said she doesn’t mind.

    “I just wish they also associated it with grassroots leadership and young people leading the way in philanthropy,” she said.

    Last year, the organization said donors gave more than $2.7 billion on Giving Tuesday, despite many fundraisers and organizations professing exhaustion with trying to design campaigns that breakthrough.

    The Gates Foundation has previously given the organization $10.5 million since its founding. GivingTuesday also received $7 million from novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2021.

    Curran said the gift will accelerate the organization’s plans to expand a database that includes information about giving from a range of sources including the payment processor PayPal, Charity Navigator, crowdfunding sites GoFundMe, DonorsChoose and Tiltify as well as major institutions that offer donor-advised funds like Fidelity Charitable and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

    GivingTuesday said they aim to raise $26 million over five years to fund the data project and already have 40% of that amount committed.

    The software company Blackbaud, which works with nonprofits, universities and foundations, said they do not share their raw donation data with third parties. though they do provide GivingTuesday the total amount of donations they process on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

    Other organizations also track philanthropic giving — including Candid, which collects giving data from philanthropic foundations, governments and nonprofits, as well as major academic studies like one at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy that has surveyed the giving behavior of the same American households for decades. The Giving USA Foundation also releases an annual analysis of giving trends, that includes many datasets but doesn’t capture person to person giving or mutual aid.

    GivingTuesday aims to collect data about individual donations, which Jake Garcia, vice president of data at Candid, said could complement these other projects and help answer questions about giving trends.

    “The stock market’s down, do donations go up or down?” Garcia said. “Number of donations, amount for donations, the type of donations they make. . . Those trends, I think, are the kinds of things that could be really revelatory if they can get a good enough body of data.”

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    Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

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  • Gates Foundation pledges $1.2B to eradicate polio globally

    Gates Foundation pledges $1.2B to eradicate polio globally

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    BERLIN — The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will commit $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide.

    The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026. The initiative is trying to end the polio virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two endemic countries, the foundation said in a statement Sunday.

    The money also will be used to stop outbreaks of new variants of the virus. The announcement was made Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin.

    The foundation says in a statement on its website that it has contributed nearly $5 billion to the polio eradication initiative. The initiative is trying to integrate polio campaigns into broader health services, while it scales up use of the novel oral polio vaccine type 2.

    The group also is working to make national health systems stronger so countries are better prepared for future health threats, the statement said.

    “The last steps to eradication are by far the toughest. But our foundation remains dedicated to a polio-free future, and we’re optimistic that we will see it soon,” said foundation CEO Mark Suzman.

    Pakistan has reported 20 polio cases so far this year, all in the north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

    Afghanistan, which has registered two cases this year, previously lacked access to vaccines because of violence and the Taliban banning polio teams in areas under its control. However last year, a few months after they took over Afghanistan, the Taliban agreed to allow United Nations health workers to begin a national campaign.

    Pakistan has long struggled with Islamic militants targeting polio workers and the police protecting them, falsely claiming that vaccinations are a Western campaign to sterilize children. This year, it has the added challenge of unprecedented rainfall destroying road networks and health facilities, limiting vaccination drives, and displacing communities.

    Despite the billions of dollars that have gone into the effort to eradicate polio since 1988 — the program costs about $1 billion every year — the World Health Organization and partners have missed repeated deadlines to wipe out the disease and have come under sustained criticism for failing to adapt to challenges. In recent years, for example, there have been more cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine used in eradication efforts than those caused by the wild virus.

    Numerous experts have also questioned whether more money is what’s needed to eradicate polio, as the initiative is already one of the best funded in global public health and has rarely faced any funding gaps. Although WHO and partners have reduced the incidence of polio by more than 99%, that progress was largely made in the first 10 years. The disease remains stubbornly entrenched in war-torn regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan and there have been dozens of vaccine-triggered outbreaks in Africa and elsewhere in recent years, including the U.S. and Israel.

    An independent panel formed to evaluate the eradication effort’s progress has repeatedly identified significant strategic mistakes made by countries, WHO and their donors, warning that their reluctance to change course, among other issues, may ultimately allow polio to resurge.

    The eradication initiative is a public-private partnership led by a group of national governments that includes the Gates Foundation, Rotary International, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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  • Gates Foundation Pledges $1.2 Billion To Polio Eradication

    Gates Foundation Pledges $1.2 Billion To Polio Eradication

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    Topline

    The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced Sunday it will donate $1.2 billion to help eradicate wild polio in the two remaining countries—Pakistan and Afghanistan—where the virus is endemic and prevent new strains of the virus from emerging, months after New York reported its first vaccine-derived polio case in nearly a decade.

    Key Facts

    The money will go toward the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a partnership including the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that focuses on eradicating the spread of polio.

    The organization is seeking to raise $4.8 billion in total for its 2022-2026 program, and will raise more funds at a summit on October 18, according to the Gates Foundation.

    Although significant progress has been achieved in the fight against polio, the disease “remains a threat,” billionaire co-founder Bill Gates said in a statement.

    Melinda French Gates, the nonprofit’s co-founder and Bill Gates’ ex-wife, added that polio vaccination campaigns have “played a key role in strengthening health systems” in addition to stopping the spread of the disease.

    Big Number

    370 million. That’s how many children GPEI hopes to vaccinate against polio every year from 2022 to 2026, the Gates Foundation said Sunday.

    News Peg

    The ten-figure donation comes after samples of poliovirus were found in both the state of New York and London, leading officials to monitor for cases and ramp up calls for vaccination. The cases are believed to be from vaccine-derived polio: People who are vaccinated with live poliovirus can shed it in their stool, where it can spread through wastewater, mutate and then infect others who come into contact. New York declared an emergency last month after the virus was found in a fourth county in addition to New York City, and the state began monitoring wastewater after a vaccine-derived case of polio caused paralysis in a 20-year-old unvaccinated man in Rockland County. Many of the New York counties where the virus has been found have polio vaccination rates well below the national average. In London, health officials announced a new vaccination campaign in August to help boost coverage in children under 10, after vaccine-derived poliovirus was detected in wastewater from North and East London for the first time in decades.

    Key Background

    Polio is a contagious disease transmitted mostly through contact with fecal samples and occasionally coughing and sneezing. Before the polio vaccine was developed in 1955, around 15,000 people in the U.S. developed paralysis from the illness every year, according to the CDC. Poliovirus has been eliminated in many countries worldwide as a result of mass vaccination campaigns, including GPEI, which was launched in 1988 and is one of the largest worldwide public health initiatives in history. However, the virus still circulates in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where political instability and prolonged conflict have impeded vaccination campaigns. As of 2021, about 75% of Afghan children ages 12 to 23 months had been fully vaccinated against polio, while 83% had been vaccinated in Pakistan, according to UNICEF. The Gates Foundation has donated nearly $5 billion to the GPEI initiative in the past, while governments in high-income countries and other nonprofits have also contributed.

    Tangent

    Bill Gates told Forbes last month he plans to wrap up the foundation he co-chairs with Melinda in 25 years, explaining that “spending all the money in that timeframe makes sense.” During that time, he said he hopes to “try and bring infectious disease, or all of the diseases that make the world inequitable,” to an end, either through “eradication or getting them down to very low levels.” The news came after Gates announced in July he had made a $20 billion donation to the foundation. He said he plans to keep giving until he is no longer a billionaire.

    Forbes Valuation

    Gates—who made his fortune by co-founding Microsoft—is worth $99.8 billion, according to Forbes’ real-time estimates, making him the fifth richest person in the world. His ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, is worth $6.1 billion.

    Further Reading

    Gates Pledges $1.2 Billion to Speed End of Crippling Poliovirus (Bloomberg)

    Exclusive: Bill Gates Reveals The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Aims To Run For Just 25 More Years (Forbes)

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    Madeline Halpert, Forbes Staff

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