Philanthropist Melinda French Gates has announced she’s donating $1 billion over the next two years to support women and families around the world. About $200 million of the money will go specifically to organisations fighting for reproductive rights in the US.
French Gates’ donation comes as she steps away from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which she helped to co-found nearly 25 years ago. In a New York Times op-ed published Tuesday, she said her reasoning for this decision was based on this piece of advice she’d received: ‘Set your own agenda, or someone else will set it for you’.
“I’ve carried those words with me ever since,” she writes.
After nearly 20 years as an advocate for women and girls, French Gates says she’s learned that gender equality can easily fall off the global agenda, but decades of research shows that investing in women and girls benefits everyone.
The donation money from French Gates will be distributed through her company, Pivotal Ventures. The first grant recipients will go “to groups working in the United States to protect the rights of women and advance their power and influence”.
These groups include the National Women’s Law Center, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“As shocking as it is to contemplate, my 1-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had,” French Gates writes, on her motivation to support these underfunded groups.
She also notes that the donation was made with the motivation to close the racial gap in maternal mortality rates for women in the US, where Black and Native American mothers are at highest risk.
“Women in 14 states have lost the right to terminate a pregnancy under almost any circumstances. We remain the only advanced economy without any form of national paid family leave. And the number of teenage girls experiencing suicidal thoughts and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness is at a decade high,” she writes.
Along with supporting women in the US, French Gates plans to give $20 million of her donation to a “diverse group of 12 global leaders” to distribute to organisations of their choice before the end of 2026.
This group includes the former prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, the athlete and maternal-health advocate Allyson Felix, and an Afghan champion of girls’ education, Shabana Basij-Rasikh.
French Gates will also create a $250 million initiative to focus on improving the global mental and physical health of women and girls.
“As a young woman, I could never have imagined that one day I would be part of an effort like this,” she writes. “Because I have been given this extraordinary opportunity, I am determined to do everything I can to seize it and to set an agenda that helps other women and girls set theirs, too.”