Development assistance for health from Gates Foundation 2000-2020
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has increased its DAH in the past two decades by nearly ten times, from 370 million U.S. dollars in 2000 to 3.1 billion U.S. dollars by 2020. The foundation is consistently among the top public funders in the world for various disease research focuses and for international health grants. In 2019, the foundation provided 619 million U.S. dollars of research and development funding for neglected diseases.
Originally, this foundation was established under the name the William H. Gates Foundation in 1997. In 2006, Warren Buffet pledged to donate about 10 million U.S. dollars in Berkshire Hathaway shares in annual contributions to the foundation. More recently, in 2013, Buffet announced he would donate an additional 2 billion U.S. dollars to the foundation. As of March 2021, Buffet was considered one of the world’s wealthiest individuals and was worth an estimated 95.1 billion U.S. dollars. Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has six main divisions including Gender Equality, Global Development, Global Growth and Opportunity, Global Health, Global Policy & Advocacy, and United States Program. The Foundation also announced an open access policy for all publications and data, implemented in 2015, to provide accessible peer-reviewed research as well as all associated data sets.