Melinda French Gates to quit Gates Foundation: How the nonprofit transformed philanthropy

Melinda French Gates has decided to resign as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropic organisations started by her and her ex-husband Bill Gates in 2000.

“This is not a decision I came to lightly. I am immensely proud of the foundation that Bill and I built together and of the extraordinary work it is doing to address inequities around the world,” Melinda wrote on X on Monday (13 May).

Her last working day at the foundation will be 7 June.

What have Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates said about her resignation? How has the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation transformed lives? Let’s understand.

Melinda French Gates to focus on her venture

The announcement came three years after Melinda’s divorce from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. In 2021, the pair announced their separation after 27 years of marriage but had vowed to continue their joint philanthropic work.

The billionaire thanked Melinda for her “critical” contributions to the foundation, saying “I am sorry to see her leave, but I am sure she will have a huge impact in her future philanthropic work,” reported Associated Press (AP).

Melinda will receive $12.5 billion as part of her agreement with her ex-husband, which she said she would invest in her own charitable work on women and families.

She founded the investment company Pivotal Ventures in 2015 which focuses on the economic empowerment of women and minority groups.

“This is a critical moment for women and girls in the US and around the world - and those fighting to protect and advance equality are in urgent need of support,” she said in her statement on Monday.

As per AP, a spokesperson said the foundation’s name will be changed to the Gates Foundation.

How the Gates Foundation came to be

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was set up in 2000 after merging two previous Gates family foundations.

Bill Gates was the richest person in the world at that time. Today, his net value is estimated to be $130.1 billion by Forbes. French Gates’ fortune is valued at $11.3 billion, noted BBC.

The former couple say that they were moved to work on global health after they read a newspaper report about how millions of children died of preventable diseases in poorer countries.

As new parents, this “hit us especially hard”.

They recalled sending the article to Bill’s father with a note saying: “Dad, maybe we can do something about this.”

“Those eight words changed the rest of our lives,” they say on the foundation’s website.

Bill started distancing himself from Microsoft to concentrate on the charity’s endeavours. At the same time, Melinda steered the direction of the foundation as a co-chair with a special interest in empowering women and girls, reported BBC.

Currently, the foundation has 2,026 employees in offices around the world, including in Washington DC, Delhi, Beijing and Johannesburg.

How the Gates Foundation is transforming lives

The Gates Foundation is one of the most influential private institutions in global public health, with an endowment of over $75 billion as of December 2023.

The foundation plans to spend $8.6 billion on charitable work throughout 2024.

As per the foundation’s website, Melinda and Bill have donated more than $36 billion of their own wealth from 1994 to 2018 to the nonprofit.

The US billionaire investor Warren E Buffett has reportedly given over $30 billion in annual donations to the foundation. As per Fortune magazine, he had said about the billionaire benefactors, “They could have elected to do anything with their lives and both of them are not only spending money but huge amounts of their time and energy around the world to make life better for people. Think about that.”

Headquartered in the US’ Seattle, the Gates Foundation supports major international institutions like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization (WHO) and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In 2020, the Gates Foundation pledged $1.6 billion to Gavi, which aims to improve vaccination access in poor countries.

The organisation said at the time that this funding for a five-year period would “help an additional 300 million (30 crore) children in the world’s most vulnerable communities and save up to eight million (80 lakh) lives, bringing the total number of children immunised with Gavi support to more than one billion (100 crore) since its inception in 2000.”

The foundation also funds research into several health issues such as child malnutrition, maternal health, eradicating polio and tackling malaria , according to the AP report.

It previously said it would commit $1.2 billion to implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy to end the polio virus in the last two endemic countries – Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Sanitation is also a field that the foundation focuses on. The organisation has put millions of dollars into pushing technological advances in sanitation.

In the United States, the foundation has provided at least 20,000 scholarships to high-achieving university students of colour from low-income backgrounds. The former couple had lamented in 2020 about not seeing significant improvements in US public education despite financial contributions over the past two decades.

The Gates Foundation has invested in family planning efforts and combating poverty and disease in poorer countries.

It also wants to improve agriculture technology and help small farmers adapt to climate change.

Concerns about the foundation’s influence

The Gates Foundation is one of the most powerful forces in global public health. Some have raised concerns about a private organisation’s monumental influence on global health.

The foundation is the largest private donor to the WHO, only second to the US’s annual donation in 2018-2019.

Gates Foundation-backed Gavi was among the key players in distributing COVID-19 vaccines in developing countries.

Concerns arose after former US president Donald Trump threatened to pull funding from the United Nations health agency in 2020.

“Currently, WHO has full control over only about a quarter of its budget,” Lawrence Gostin, Director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, told Euronews Next last year.

“WHO therefore can’t set the global health agenda and has had to do the bidding of rich donors, not only rich nations in Europe and North America, but also rich philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation”.

This evokes the persistent question of how unelected wealthy people have such an outsized influence on the global stage.

With inputs from agencies