Bill Gates to give away his fortune: What it means for global healthcare
Bill Gates
and his former wife,
Melinda Gates
, together founded the
Gates Foundation
in 2000. The aim of the foundation was to help all people lead healthy and productive lives, as every life has equal value. On May 8, 2025, the Gates Foundation celebrated its 25th anniversary with an announcement that shocked many to the core and left the future of global healthcare with a huge question mark.
Bill Gates announced that the Gates Foundation would be closing on December 31st, 2045. Currently, he is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous aid, which means a monetary dedication of more than $200 billion targeting health and human development. This end has come significantly earlier than was previously anticipated by the founder and his team, but they now believe that their central goals can be achieved in much shorter time.
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This is what the Gates Foundation will be doing for global healthcare in what has been termed by the founder as their "miraculous period."
The current situation
American President
Donald Trump
has announced several cuts in foreign aid provided by the U.S. across the globe. As a result of this, a study in The Lancet stated that due to the cuts in American spending in PEPFAR, a program that delivered H.I.V and AIDS relief abroad, about 500,000 children could lose their lives by 2030.
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The journal Nature stated that the overall reduction in U.S. aid could lead to roughly 25 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.
Over the 25-year course of the foundation, it reduced 10 million childhood deaths to 5 million. With proper resources, this number could be cut by half; however, in the current scenario, where aid to places such as Mozambique in Gaza, which requires aid for H.I.V, is being cut, Gates predicted that millions of additional kids could die.
Gates shared in an interview with the New York Times that while vaccines had been the saving grace during the pandemic, they are now being seen with suspicion and that the commitment to health surveillance had decreased. He added that the global health and healthcare systems had been affected by the pandemic. He shared how Africa had been the worst hit over the years, with progress slowing down due to various civil wars.
While the U.S. should be helping right now with debt relief to the African countries, he shared that with the current power, that will is no more. What will happen now, and how is the Gates Foundation planning to tackle these issues?
New cures coming up
Image credits: Getty Images
Bill Gates shared that the foundation has a lot of new stuff in the pipeline related to diseases such as tuberculosis. He announced that they will have a genetic cure for H.I.V.
The three main goals for global healthcare
For the organisation's final phase, Gates highlighted three goals it would be focusing on: Eliminating preventable deaths among babies and mothers, eradicating infectious diseases such as typhoid, malaria, cholera, lymphatic filariasis and eliminating poverty.
Eliminating preventable deaths among babies and mothers
Gates announced that the first major goal for the next twenty years is to ensure that "no mom, child or baby dies of a preventable cause." The foundation is focusing on maternal mortality, specifically on eclampsia and gestational diabetes, to reduce maternal mortality by half.
Eradicating infectious diseases
Image credits: Getty Images
While diseases like rotavirus can not be suppressed, the Gates Foundation is aiming to get rid of lymphatic filariasis in India, and for H.I.V.,
he shared about a shot called Lenacapavir, which allows women six months of protection and an oral drug called Merck that has to be taken just once a month. He added that for Merck, they were reducing the cost to $2 to make it even more accessible.
Eliminating poverty
The Gates Foundation wishes to eliminate poverty in Africa by improving the country's agriculture. It has invested in seed improvement, such as gene-edited seeds, which will result in "Green-Revolution-type-seed-productivity-improvements and disease resistance"
A.I. is the future
Gates referred to A.I. as a "magic wand" that can bring advances into health systems, agriculture systems, and education systems. "I wish I didn't have to rely on that magic wand, but I guarantee you that it is real. I'm not
making that up," he said to the New York Times. He shared that the foundation will be making use of AI to "make things better in the next 20 years."
It seems in the next 20 years, the Gates Foundation aims to do all it can to leave the world healthier and stronger than it was before the foundation began its impactful work in 2000.
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