The Gates Foundation will give $912 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, philanthropist Bill Gates announced on Monday as he urged governments to reverse global health funding cuts.
Speaking at a Reuters Newsmaker event in New York, Gates said the world was at a crossroads, with millions of children at risk of dying if funding drops too steeply.
The Gates Foundation’s pledge matches its donation in 2022. That was the last time the Global Fund, a Geneva-based independent nonprofit, raised money on its three-year budget cycle. The announcement follows deep aid cuts from governments around the world, led by the United States.
“A kid born in northern Nigeria has a 15% chance of dying before the age of 5. You can either be part of improving that or act like that doesn't matter," Gates said in an interview before the foundation's annual Goalkeepers event in New York on Monday.
The event celebrates and seeks to accelerate progress on United Nations global development goals set for 2030, including improving health and ending poverty.
"I am not capable of making up what the government cuts, and I don’t want to create an illusion of that," he said about his pledge.
The Gates Foundation, the philanthropy started by the Microsoft co-founder and his then-wife in 2000, is one of the world's biggest funders of global health initiatives, with a particular focus on ending preventable deaths of mothers and babies, tackling infectious diseases and lifting millions out of poverty.
Earlier this year, Gates
pledged to give away almost his entire $200 billion fortune by 2045, more quickly than planned because of the urgent need worldwide.
