OVERVIEW: The Gates Foundation funds nonprofit and for-profit organizations in dozens of issue areas. Grantmaking is global in scope, with partnerships in over 130 countries.
IP TAKE: The Gates Foundation remains one of the most powerful philanthropies in the world. As IP’s Philip Rojc has written, its scale and long-standing influence in global health and development make it “a kind of lynchpin for the current global philanthropic order.” Its grantmaking is vast, but Gates is best known for major investments in global disease, maternal and child health, nutrition, agriculture, gender equity, economic inclusion and U.S. education.
The foundation is also entering a new phase. Since late 2024, Gates has been reassessing its role amid cuts to public and global health funding, a shift Inside Philanthropy founder David Callahan covers. In May 2025, Bill Gates announced that he will be sunsetting the Gates Foundation by 2045, give away $200 billion and double its grantmaking to improve “lives around the world.” How that acceleration will play out across programs is still unfolding.
Despite strong transparency around grants and finances, Gates is not an open-cycle funder. Most proposals are invited by staff, and the foundation generally does not fund outside its priorities. It occasionally posts RFPs, RFIs and Grand Challenges opportunities, including recent calls tied to diagnostics, AI, nutrition, diarrheal disease, malnutrition treatment and women’s and children’s health.
The strongest prospects are evidence-rich organizations with technical expertise, scale, data capacity and clear alignment with Gates priorities. The best route is visibility through Gates-funded ecosystems, existing grantees, technical coalitions, research consortia and priority-country networks—not a cold proposal.
To learn more about Bill Gates’s investments in climate, see Breakthrough Energy Foundation. Separately, Bill Gates also started a company called TerraPower to “bring safe, clean, next-generation nuclear technology to life.” See also Gates Philanthropy Partners.
For information about Melinda French Gates’s philanthropy since leaving the Gates Foundation, see IP’s profile of Pivotal.
PROFILE: The Gates Foundation was cofounded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. French Gates stepped down as co-chair of the foundation in May 2024. Headquartered in Seattle, the foundation was initially formed as a merger between two pre-existing Gates philanthropies, the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation.
The foundation’s early focus areas included education in the U.S. and global disease eradication. Over the years, its global programs have expanded significantly. Today, The Gates Foundation is the largest charitable organization in the United States by far, with an endowment of around $70 billion. The foundation defines itself as a “nonprofit fighting poverty, disease and inequity around the world,” and its mission is to “create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.”
Gates is a Giving Pledge signatory who has pledged to give away “virtually all” of his wealth. As Bill Gates’ personal fortune continues to balloon, the foundation’s coffers likewise grow. In 2022, Gates announced that by 2026, the Gates Foundation’s annual grantmaking budget will be $9 billion, and in May 2025, the foundation committed to giving away $200 billion by 2045, when it intends to shut down permanently.
Gates is now presenting its final two decades around three goals—preventable maternal/child deaths, deadly infectious diseases, and poverty/prosperity—and five core priorities: maternal and child health, nutrition, infectious disease, agriculture and U.S. education.
Global Program
The foundation’s global funding encompasses four main giving areas, which include Global Development, Global Growth and Opportunity, Global Health, and Policy and Advocacy. Funding here often intersects with sustainable farming and food, journalism, finance, science and medical research. In 2026, the foundation established a new Africa and India Offices Division. Learn more about each area of international development below:
Grants for Global Development and Health
The Global Development program “focuses on improving the delivery of high-impact health products and services to the world’s poorest communities and helps countries expand access to health coverage.”
- Interests include Emergency Response; Global Health Agencies and Funds; Immunization; and polio.
In 2025, Gates confirmed his dedication to Gavi, the foundation’s largest grantee, announcing that the Gates Foundation would be providing $1.6 billion over the next five years.
- Not open generally. Gates says the majority of grants go to organizations identified by staff; it directly invites proposals in most cases and occasionally uses RFPs.
Gates’ Global Growth and Opportunity giving area “focuses on creating and scaling market-based innovations to stimulate inclusive and sustainable economic growth.”
Interests include Agricultural Development, focused on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; Nutrition; Inclusive Financial Systems; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene; Global Education; and Digital Public Infrastructure.
- Primarily invited; occasional RFPs. Gates’s own FAQ says it does not fund outside priorities and generally invites proposals directly.
- Per the 2026 Annual Letter, agriculture and nutrition are now among the explicit core priorities for the final 20 years.
The Global Health “aims to reduce inequities in health by developing new tools and strategies to reduce the burden of infectious disease and the leading causes of child mortality in developing countries.” The foundation’s global health work has received criticism in its approaches.
Interests include Discovery & Translational Sciences; Global Health Discovery Collaboratory; Gates Medical Research Institute; Accelerator; Integrated Development; and the Institute for Disease Modeling
The Gates Foundation runs significant subprograms for the prevention, treatment and eradication of specific diseases. These include HIV, Malaria, Neglected Tropical Diseases, Pneumonia, Tuberculosis, and Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases. A separate and significant subprogram is devoted to Vaccine Development and Surveillance. Look for these programs to expand in the coming years, as disease eradication is a major part of the foundation’s decades-long sunsetting plan.
Notably, it was the Gates Foundation that provided seed funding for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002. Since its founding, this massive international financing partnership has dispersed $60 billon to fight these diseases. The Gates Foundation has continued to support this work in myriad ways.
- Primarily invited, with open calls through Grand Challenges and other RFPs.
The Global Policy and Advocacy seeks to build strategic relationships and promote policies that advance its work.
- Current subprograms include Development Policy and Finance; Global Media Partnerships; Philanthropic Partnerships; and Tobacco Control.
- Primarily relationship-driven and invited. Gates’s access rules apply foundation-wide: staff identification, direct invitation and occasional RFPs.
Global Grants for Women, Reproductive and Maternal Health
The Gates Foundation’s global Gender Equality area “works to ensure women and girls in Africa and South Asia can enjoy good health, make their own choices, earn their own money, and be leaders in their societies.” Grantmaking for women and girls overlaps with some of the foundation’s other global grantmaking goals and priorities, particularly in areas related to health and economic development. This is a major portfolio within the foundation, with a commitment of $2.1 billion to gender equality through 2026. Giving in these areas will likely increase substantially in the coming years in response to vast reductions of funding to U.S.A.I.D. for programs relating to maternal and infant health.
- Interests include Family Planning; Maternal, Newborn, Child Nutrition & Health; Women in Leadership; Women’s Economic Opportunity; and Women’s Health Innovations.
- In August 2025, Gates committed $2.5 billion over five years “to catalyze innovation in maternal, menstrual, gynecological, and sexual health for women globally.” This comes in response to the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid programs. (Read more about this in Inside Philanthropy’s reporting here.)
- Several strategic initiatives build on the foundation’s existing strengths in data, health, and development.
- Primarily invited; some related open RFPs run through Grand Challenges or special initiatives. Gates says individuals are generally not funded except in rare circumstances or specific application programs such as certain Grand Challenges initiatives.
U.S. Program
The U.S. Program says it works with local leaders, national partners, institutional leaders and other stakeholders on educational and economic systems. Current listed subprograms are Data, Early Learning Solutions, Economic Mobility and Opportunity, K-12 Education, Pathways, Postsecondary Success and Washington State.
The U.S. Program says it regularly posts RFIs and RFPs and wants to learn from organizations that have demonstrated strong outcomes. That is more open than many Gates global portfolios, but it is still not a general unsolicited-application funder.
Grants for Education
- Education funding in the U.S. stems from several subprograms and spans early childhood, K-12 and post-secondary education.
Data aims to “ensure that educators, families, and policymakers across the United States have the information they need to help students succeed in school and in life.”
Early Learning Solutions is the subprogram for early childhood education. Grantmaking here works nationally to improve “access to high-quality, affordable, personalized early learning opportunities.”
K-12 Education works to improve K-12 learning with a strong focus on mathematics as “the cornerstone skill for academic success and greater opportunities in the workforce.”
Pathways is the Gates Foundation’s college and career readiness program. Grantmaking works to support students “in their transition from high school to college, career, and beyond,” with a strong focus on “Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty.”
Post-Secondary Success aims to “dramatically improve student outcomes and ensure that race, ethnicity, and income are not predictors of postsecondary success.” A main thrust of the program is collaborating with colleges, universities, policymakers and others to provide both support and institutional innovation to “help students identify and get on a path to a certificate or degree, stay on that path, and ensure that they are learning along the way.”
Finally, the Gates Foundation runs a separate initiative for Washington State, where it “help[s] more students […] enroll in a postsecondary program after high school.” A multi-year commitment of $75 million supports “schools, colleges and community organizations” that share the foundation’s goal of increasing students pursuing higher education.
- Gates also makes U.S.-based education grants via the Gates Scholarship, available on a separate site. This program was established in 2017 to help students from low-income backgrounds achieve their potential. Recipients have access to support and resources beyond the scholarship itself.
Grants for Economic Development and Opportunity
Economic Mobility and Opportunity aims to “help the U.S. economic system better meet the needs of those experiencing poverty and significantly increase their opportunities to achieve economic success.”
- The program focuses on “the 47 million people in the U.S. ages 16 to 64 whose annual incomes are below 200% of the federal poverty level” and collaborates with multiple stakeholders to create conditions in which low-income people can “achieve long-term economic stability.”
- To these ends, the Gates Foundation has also collaborated with the Urban Institute and others to create Workrise, “a national platform that funds research and data collection on the labor market.”
- Other grantees in this area include Washington’s Opportunity at Work, Worklife Partnership, Innovations for Poverty Action and Code for America Labs.
Other opportunities:
Gates’s “How We Work” page says program teams work with the Strategic Investment Fund when they want private-sector science and technology expertise, and that SIF has a separate budget for funding companies’ work on charitable projects.
- It supports private-sector and market-based tools aligned with charitable goals, including agriculture/nutrition, inclusive financial systems, healthcare delivery, life sciences, U.S. education/opportunity and women’s innovation.
- Not a standard grant application pathway. It is program-team-driven and aligned with charitable projects.
Important Grant Details:
Gates Foundation grants range between $5,000 and $1 million, but can go up to $100 million or higher, in some cases. It had net assets of about $72.7 billion and total assets of about $78.7 billion in 2024.Most grants are awarded in amounts of $100,000 or more. The foundation has given away over $100 billion since it was founded.
Gates’s 2024 annual report reports $8.015 billion in charitable support, with the largest program allocations to Global Development ($2.089 billion), Global Health ($1.910 billion), Gender Equality ($934 million), Global Growth & Opportunity ($876 million), U.S. Program ($784 million) and Global Policy & Advocacy ($354 million).
- Population/community focus: Low- and middle-income countries globally, with strong emphasis on Africa and South Asia; U.S. education work focuses on students facing inequities by race, ethnicity and income.
- Geography: Gates says it works primarily in low- and middle-income countries and has offices across Africa, India, China, Singapore, Europe/Middle East and North America.
- Types of work funded: Research, product development, data systems, implementation science, policy and advocacy, institutional capacity, technical assistance, market-shaping tools, volume guarantees, strategic investments, public-interest media tied to global health/development, education systems change, and scaling proven interventions. Gates says it funds grantees and private companies, supports coalitions, requires global access for funded knowledge/products, and uses catalytic philanthropy to unlock public and private action.
- Less likely to be funded: Local direct-service organizations without a clear Gates-priority fit, groups outside the foundation’s priority geographies, organizations seeking capital/building campaigns, projects focused on health issues in high-income countries, religious-purpose projects, political campaigns or direct lobbying, and individual fundraising efforts. Gates explicitly lists these exclusions.
- Typical grantees: The pattern strongly favors large global NGOs, multilaterals, universities, research institutions, public-health partnerships, fiscal sponsor/intermediary platforms and specialized technical organizations.
This funder does not generally accept proposals for funding, but it does occasionally post RFPs for specific projects, often concerning data collection, analysis and program evaluations.
Additional information about Gates’s grantmaking is available at its How We Work page and its searchable Committed Grants database.
Program pages feature profiles of team members and leadership, making it possible to network with relevant staff.
- Submit general inquiries to the Gates Foundation via its contact page, which also provides links to the foundation’s social media accounts. The foundation’s phone number is listed as (206) 709-3100.
PEOPLE:
Search for staff contact info and bios in PeopleFinder (paid subscribers only).
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