The shock announcement that billionaire philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates are to divorce after 27 years of marriage has raised questions about the future of their hugely influential charity.
Here, AFP looks at the Gates Foundation, from how it works and what projects it finances, to its impact on the pandemic and how the non-profit may be impacted by the split.
Its mission, and Massive budget
The couple says the idea for the foundation came to them as young parents when they read a newspaper article about millions of children in developing countries dying from easily treatable illnesses such as diarrhea and pneumonia.
In 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched to fight disease and poverty around the world. In the United States, an initial focus on providing access to computers and the internet was expanded to improving education in general.
With 1,600 staff members in offices around the world, the Gates Foundation gives away roughly $5 billion each year in areas like global public health and development. The foundation says it has spent $54.8 billion since its inception. More than $2 billion has gone towards fighting malaria alone with the aim of eradicating the mosquito-borne disease “within a generation.”
The charity has also contributed several billion dollars towards a global campaign to end polio through the widespread immunization of children. It donated more than $50 million during the Ebola outbreak in 2014.
Dozens of other programs it funds include nutrition, sanitation, maternal and newborn child health, and agricultural development. Last year, the foundation pledged about $250 million to help fight the pandemic, with some of the funds channeled to the distribution of life-saving doses of Covid-19 vaccines to parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The money also went to testing, personal protective equipment, and support of overwhelmed health services, particularly in developing countries. It was also key in forming Covax, a global program to help supply vaccines to the poorest countries.
In total, the foundation says it has spent some $1.75 billion fighting Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. It found itself embroiled in controversy though after it was accused of pushing Oxford University to sign an exclusive agreement with AstraZeneca for its vaccine rather than donate the rights to any drugmaker.
Does divorce threaten the foundation?
Bill, the fourth richest man in the world with a fortune valued by Forbes at $130 billion, and Melinda have pledged to continue working together for the foundation.
But their divorce could create new questions about their wealth, most of which has yet to be donated to the foundation, despite co-creating the Giving Pledge. The future of the Gates Foundation could depend on the financial terms of the divorce, which is still unknown.
Melinda might want to follow the example of MacKenzie Scott, who quickly gave away an estimated $6 billion after she divorced from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019 and is now a powerful independent philanthropist in her own right.
