Back to all friday 5
Friday 5
The Gates Foundation’s intent to shut its doors in 2045
16 May, 2025
Announcing the end date of your Foundation seems, at first glance, a curious way to celebrate its 25th anniversary. But when you’re Bill Gates, and your Foundation has given away $100bn, normal rules do not apply.
Gates set out his decision to shutter the Foundation in 2045 and the reasons behind it in an extensive blog post and a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times. These comms included reflections of the sort you might more naturally expect for an anniversary announcement, looking back on what has been achieved. And the achievements are remarkable. By focusing resources at scale on clear and defined challenges, and persuading others to come with him, he has enabled some staggering advances in global health. To take just one example, through a focus on vaccinating children under five, the Foundation supported the creation of a new vaccine for rotavirus that has helped reduce the number of children who die from diarrhoea each year by 75 percent.
Gates also reflects on the current context for international development, and the relevance of this to his decision to shut the Foundation. The fact that the US, UK, France, and other countries around the world are cutting their aid budgets by tens of billions of dollars is a statement of fact. It also creates a huge hole in vital services. And as Gates puts it: ‘it’s unclear whether the world’s richest countries will continue to stand up for its poorest people.”
This uncertainty clearly powers his decision to spend more, spend faster, and act with more urgency to help people and countries out of poverty, focused on three key challenges: ending preventable deaths amongst mothers and children, eradicating deadly infectious disease and removing hundreds of millions from poverty. This being Gates, there is a lot of optimism too. He talks of this being a ‘miraculous time,’ with the most exciting work the Foundation has ever done sitting in the R&D pipeline now, waiting to be delivered.
Put the challenge and the opportunities together and the decision starts to make a lot of sense. It’s not going to be the right choice for many philanthropic institutions. The endowments and ongoing giving of organisations such as Wellcome, Carnegie and Tata Trusts mean they continue to have a profound impact on livelihoods many years (even centuries) after their founder’s death. But at a time like now, throwing $200bn dollars at three hugely ambitious and bounded goals with a timeframe of 25 years to deliver of them feels both exciting and right.
By Larissa Persons