The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – formerly known as the William H. Gates Foundation. Gates Foundation is a private foundation founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. It was launched in 2000 and is considered the largest private foundation in the United States with $50.7 billion in assets. The main goals of the foundation are to improve global health, reduce poverty, expand educational opportunities and expand access to information technology. The foundation was founded in Seattle, Washington, and is overseen by its three trustees, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. As of December 31, 2017, the foundation had $50.7 billion in contributions. Its scale and the way it seeks to apply business practices to endowments make it one of the leaders in venture philanthropy. In 2007, its founders were named the second most generous philanthropists in the U.S., with Warren Buffett first. Bill and Melinda Gates donated $36.8 billion to the foundation.
Since its founding, the foundation has supported a wide range of social, medical and educational causes.
The Foundation was founded in 1994 and was originally called the William H. Gates Foundation. In 1999, it changed its name to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and in 2000 it merged with the Gates Learning Foundation. Based in Seattle, the Foundation had $49.9 billion in assets as of December 31, 2020. Bill and Melinda Gates (as well as musician Bono) were named Time magazine’s People of the Year in 2005 for their philanthropic work. In June 2010 Warren Buffett made the largest donation in U.S. history to the tune of $37 billion.
The main goal of the foundation is to support and improve the health care system and to overcome hunger in poor countries. The Foundation’s funds were directed to the program on HIV/AIDS and TB prevention and treatment, malaria control, immunization projects for children in India and Africa, including the GAVI Alliance, and other initiatives.
The Foundation’s priority in the United States is an education improvement program. So, in 2009 the Foundation expressed its intention to allocate 12,9 million dollars for improvement of methods of distance learning in the USA, support of modern multimedia educational materials and creation of interactive educational classrooms. In the fall of 2009 the Foundation gave Ukraine a $25 million grant to computerize about a thousand public libraries.
Since 2009, Bill Gates has published an “Annual Bill Gates Message” on the official website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in which he talks about the achievements of his philanthropic organization, as well as making plans.
In January 2014, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a grant to develop a system that enables women to regulate their fertility.
In October 2017, the foundation launched a blockchain project called Mojaloop. The aim of the project is to provide the poorest people with access to financial services. The project is implemented using the Ripple Interledger protocol.
In January 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $10 million donation to fight COVID-19. In February 2020, the foundation announced it would raise that amount to $100 million. About $20 million of that amount should go to disease detection and isolation and care of the infected, another $20 million should be sent to health authorities in South Asia and Africa to develop emergency care centers and surveillance measures. The remaining 60 million will be used to develop a vaccine.