Melinda French Gates will give £190m to women’s health groups across globe

Melinda French Gates will grant 250 million dollars (£190.8 million) to support women’s health around the world as she launched an open call for non-profits to apply for funding.

The pledge signals a new chapter in her individual philanthropic giving since departing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year, and is part of a two-year, one billion dollar (£763 million) commitment that Ms French Gates made in May to support women and families around the world.

Haven Ley, chief strategy officer at Ms French Gates’ organisation Pivotal Ventures, said the grant competition was a “curtain raiser” to a likely new focus on funding women’s health globally.

Previously, Pivotal had primarily funded organisations working to advance women’s power in the US.

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Speaking about Ms French Gates – who has 20 years’ experience funding global health through the Gates Foundation, alongside her ex-husband, Microsoft supremo Bill Gates – Ms Ley said: “By focusing on women’s health, she’s expanded her definition of women’s power to include a precondition that women must have their health to be powerful.”

Lever for Change, a non-profit affiliate of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, is running the grant competition, called Action for Women’s Health.

It has previously worked with both Ms French Gates and billionaire author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to award 40 million dollars (£30.5 million) in 2019 to support non-profits building women’s power in the US.

Ms Scott – the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – also gave away 640 million dollars (£480 million) to community-based non-profits in March through a similar open call.

This new open call will give at least 100 non-profit organisations around the world between one million dollars and five million dollars (£763,000 and £3.18 million) in unrestricted funding.

It will prioritise giving to organisations for whom that amount will make a big difference, though there is no restriction on the size of the bodies who are eligible to apply.

The deadline for non-profits to register for the open call is December 3 and the application deadline, review process and final decision will stretch to the end of 2025.

The lengthy process includes a peer review by other applicants and an outside review by a panel of experts.

Cecilia Conrad, chief executive of Lever for Change, said: “Most of philanthropy remains invitation-only decision making behind closed doors.

“And what we have developed is a way to do an open call, a way to broaden access to philanthropic opportunities, that is also a process that is humane and equitable.”

She said their initial model focused on scaling a solution, with a minimum commitment from donors of 10 million dollars (£7.63 million) over five years. But now, they are also supporting donors who are interested in scaling a field.

Pivotal is purposely considering a broad range of interventions related to women’s health, which could include mental health and menopause, Ms Ley said. They hope that learning where opportunities and gaps in funding and resources are may help Pivotal design its new strategy.

Sarah Baird, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at The George Washington University, studies the impacts of different interventions on adolescents, especially girls, and what helps improve their wellbeing throughout their lives and their children’s lives.

Speaking in general, she would advise donors to work through existing institutions and to have a broader focus rather than on a single disease.

She pointed to mental health for women, and men, as being an underfunded area along with gender-based violence and overall, the economic benefits that women produce, if they are healthy enough to work.

“We’re not going to get very far if we just focus on the traditional pregnancy and the traditional mortality,” she said, which she emphasised are also critical.

When Ms French Gates first announced her one billion dollar commitment in May, she detailed 200 million dollars (£152.7 million) in new grants to groups working in the US to protect women’s rights and advance their power and influence.

She also gave 12 individuals 20 million dollars (£15.2 million) each to donate however they chose and said she would announce an open call to give away 250 million dollars (£190.8 million) this autumn.

Writing in the New York Times in May, she said of the open call: “I hope to lift up groups with personal connections to the issues they work on. People on the front lines should get the attention and investment they deserve, including from me.”