Melinda French Gates Announces $250 Million Initiative To Transform Global Health For Women

Melinda French Gates has announced a $250 million initiative designed to fund organizations around the world that are improving women’s mental and physical health. The Action for Women’s Health initiative funding is open to organizations that center equity in their approach to women’s health, according to the website. The grants are funded by Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, which was founded by Gates.

“For far too long, women’s health has been underfunded, overlooked and misunderstood,” the announcement said. “There’s so much we don’t know about women’s mental and physical health, but the data we do have shows that women are being neglected.”

A January 2024 report from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute showed that women spend 25 percent more of their lives in poor health compared to men. This discrepancy is largely a result of the systemic lack of sex- and gender-specific disease understanding, according to the report.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly 800 women died every day in 2020 from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally, almost 95% of all maternal deaths in 2020 occurred in low and lower-middle income countries.

“These health inequities not only impact women’s daily lives, but they can also hurt women’s futures,” the announcement said. “It’s clear we need to do a better job of addressing the barriers to women’s health.”

In a May New York Times op-ed, Gates said she felt compelled to offer Americans support for their reproductive freedoms following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that let states decide on abortion rights.

“For too long a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women’s rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense,” she wrote. “I want to help even the match.”

Organizations interested in applying for funding through this initiative must register to apply before Dec. 3 and must complete applications before Jan. 10, 2025. Following a review and scoring process, awardees will receive between $1 million and $5 million.  

According to NPR, the goal of the “open call” for applications is to identify nonprofits working around the country and around the world that wouldn’t have otherwise been invited to apply for her philanthropic initiatives.

“We hope to find organizations all over the world that have been working on women’s health issues – probably below the radar, quietly – and call attention to the work they’re doing, so that [other] people can imitate it and support it,” Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change, told NPR. Lever for Change is the nonprofit that is running the “open call.”

Gates announced in May of this year her resignation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At the same time, she announced she was planning on granting $1 billion over the next two year to programs and people working on women’s and family issues.

That work is being done through Pivotal Ventures, an organization which she founded in 2015 to bridge the gap between philanthropy, venture capital and advocacy.