Big bets to meet global goals

One critique we hear a lot: "Why are a couple of unelected billionaires setting the agenda for global health and development?"

Yes, our founders are billionaires. But neither they, I, nor the rest of our board of trustees set the world's agenda; as a foundation, we respond to it. We are guided by the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of concrete, measurable commitments made by every country in the United Nations to their own citizens.

From those shared priorities, we identify a subset of areas – from improving vaccination rates to advancing women's economic power – where we have the funds, expertise, and relationships to be part of the solution and where transformational progress is unlikely without our involvement. Geographically, we seek to help those who live in places with a high burden of disease and poverty.

We make all our investments public and strive to be fully transparent about our priorities and strategies. Finally, we find ways to join others who are tackling these challenges and carefully assess the landscape to determine our role. After all, while our payout is large, it's typically only a small portion of the money the world spends on these issues. So we work with partners to amplify all of our contributions.

To illuminate how we think about our role, let me address our influence through the examples of three of the important priorities reflected in our new budget and our long-term goals: helping smallholder farmers thrive despite the effects of climate change; ending malaria; and helping U.S. schools make math instruction more effective.

Agricultural adaptation: Going all in where the need is the greatest

Our work in response to climate change is a great example of how we seek to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable – and do all we can to get others to, as well.

It's a harsh reality that the communities that have contributed least to the climate crisis are already facing its most severe consequences. Nobody knows that more than smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, who are experiencing devastating floods and drought, shrinking growing seasons, and in some places even famine.

We've focused on agricultural development for 16 years, because it's one of the most effective ways to help large numbers of people lift themselves out of poverty. I recently announced at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference that we are accelerating that work with a $1.4 billion commitment over four years to help provide farmers with innovative tools and build more resilient food systems.

For years, leaders in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and other affected regions have been calling for dramatic funding increases for adaptation – that is, ways to adjust to changes in the climate, as opposed to preventing or mitigating climate change. These calls have been largely ignored. While US$632 billion was spent globally to combat climate change in 2020, just 7% of that went toward climate adaptation.

It's not that the world hasn't invested in agricultural innovation. It certainly has, with incredible advances in crop productivity over the last half-century. But shockingly little money has been spent to meet the needs of farmers in low-income countries – even by donor nations that have made public commitments to do so.

For instance, the vast majority of research and development has targeted the major crops common in wealthy nations rather than crops that millions of African families depend on. Rich countries will invest in better approaches to producing the crops that their populations rely on whether or not the Gates Foundation gets involved. But that's not true for cowpeas, millet, cassava, or direct-seeded rice.

We fund a huge volume of research – in particular through CGIAR, a network of research centers around the world – on how these crops can be produced and livestock reared more reliably, prolifically, and sustainably. We also make investments to make sure that innovations meet the needs of smallholder farmers – for example by answering low-income countries' call for better data and modeling to predict climate events.

One important component of our agricultural adaptation strategy is to prioritize the needs of women. Gender equality is a Sustainable Development Goal of its own – but it's also a vital path to meeting all of the other goals. Diseases can't be eradicated if researchers don't understand the unique ways they impact women and girls; innovative sanitation technologies won't effectively serve a community unless people of all genders are comfortable using them; anti-poverty measures won't make a dent unless they capture the millions of women earning a living outside the formal economy.

With this in mind, several years ago we made a commitment to design strategies and investments to effectively serve women and girls. Nowhere is this more relevant than in agriculture, since women comprise half of smallholder farmers worldwide. We are using our influence to put women farmers at the heart of solutions – whether that means equal access to credit and markets, farming implements tailored to them, or training to equip them to be mentors and leaders in their communities.

Perhaps most importantly, we're doing our agriculture work in partnership with regional and local institutions. While we're sometimes accused of advancing corporate interests or pushing technologies that countries don't want, in fact we work at the request of national governments and regional bodies like the African Union (which has developed a continent-wide climate strategy) and the African Adaptation Initiative (which helps governments get climate financing and coordinates advocacy efforts). We invest a lot to build up institutions, so that they can lead the work altogether. And we'll use our influence to press others to step up too.