Melinda French Gates. File photo
| Photo Credit: AP

Melinda French Gates will step down as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the nonprofit she and her ex-husband Bill Gates founded and built into one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations over the past 20 years.

“This is not a decision I came to lightly,” French Gates posted on the X platform on Monday. “I am immensely proud of the foundation that Bill and I built together and of the extraordinary work it is doing to address inequities around the world.”

She praised the foundation’s CEO, Mark Suzman, and the foundation’s board of trustees, which was significantly expanded after the couple announced their divorce in May 2021.

“The time is right for me to move forward into the next chapter of my philanthropy,” French Gates wrote in her statement. She already organizes some of her investments and philanthropic gifts through her organisation, Pivotal Ventures, which is not a nonprofit.

Future work focus on women and families

Gates thanked French Gates for her “critical” contributions to the foundation in a statement, saying, “I am sorry to see her leave, but I am sure she will have a huge impact in her future philanthropic work.”

The foundation will change its name to the Gates Foundation, a spokesperson said.

French Gates will receive $12.5 billion as part of her agreement with Mr. Gates, which she said would commit to future work focused on women and families. The foundation said that Gates would supply those funds personally, not from the foundation’s endowment.

The Gates Foundation is a massive funder of global health, supporting major international institutions like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It also funds research into a wide range of topics like child malnutrition and maternal health as well as eradicating polio and treating and preventing malaria. The foundation has also donated billions to help small farmers adapt to climate change.

In the U.S., it funded education policy and research that had sweeping, if mixed, effects, and now, has pledged to increase its support around antipoverty initiatives.

“The announcement is a surprise for many of us, but I don’t think it’s spur of the moment,” said Latanya Mapp, president and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

French Gates has already helped cement a gender equity lens within the Gates Foundation’s programs to ensure it continues on past her departure, Mapp said. The first president of the foundation’s gender equity division was hired in 2020.

When French Gates officially resigns June 7, Bill Gates will be the sole chair of the foundation’s board, though Suzman, as CEO, has taken on a higher profile role in the past three years. For example, he began writing the foundation’s annual letter outlining its priorities in 2022.

Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex and author of “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy,” said French Gates’ departure again raises the question of whether power over the foundation should be more widely distributed.

“Should there be more than a tight nucleus of people in charge?” asked McGoey, adding that the foundation controls a great deal of funding that affects people who lack “a democratic pathway” to contest how it’s used.

In an emailed statement, the foundation said that Suzman announced French Gates’ decision to employees on Monday.

“After a difficult few years watching women’s rights rolled back in the U.S. and around the world, she wants to use this next chapter to focus specifically on altering that trajectory,” Suzman said of French Gates.

Mr. Suzman said he knew many had joined the foundation in part because of their admiration for her advocacy, especially around gender equity.

“I know how beloved Melinda is here,” Mr. Suzman wrote.

The Gates Foundation holds $75.2 billion in its endowment as of December 2023, and announced in January, it planned to spend $8.6 billion through the course of its work in 2024.

Headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.
| Photo Credit: AP

A $40 million investment will help several African manufacturers produce new messenger RNA vaccines on the continent where people were last in line to receive jabs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday.

While it could still take at least three more years before any of the vaccines are approved and on the market, the foundation said that its mRNA investment marks an important step forward in improving vaccine equity.

“Whether it’s for local diseases in Africa like Rift Valley (fever) or for global diseases like TB, mRNA looks like a very promising approach,” Bill Gates told The Associated Press on Sunday after visiting one of the facilities involved, the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal.

“And so it allows us to bring in lots of African capabilities to work on these vaccines, and then this can be scaled up.”

The announcement comes as the foundation opens its annual three-day Grand Challenges event, which brings together scientists and public health researchers from around the world.

Institut Pasteur, along with the South Africa-based company Biovac, will be using an mRNA research and manufacturing platform that was developed by Quantoom Biosciences in Belgium.

The two Africa-based vaccine manufacturers are receiving $5 million each in funding from the foundation, while another $10 million is earmarked for other companies that have not yet been named.

The remaining $20 million is going to Quantoom “to further advance the technology and lower costs.”

The mRNA vaccine technology came to the forefront with the production of COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna.

The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins. And by picking the right virus protein to target, the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.

Those COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were fast-tracked through the regulatory process and granted emergency use authorisation.

The new vaccines under development in Africa face a far longer development timeline — anywhere from three to seven years.

Dr. Amadou Sall, chief executive officer at Institut Pasteur, said the deal will help build vaccine self-reliance in Africa.

The institute already has been producing yellow fever jabs since the 1930s and now hopes mRNA technology can be harnessed to produce vaccines for diseases endemic on the continent like Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

“What we want is next time there is a pandemic — we hope it won’t happen soon — Africa would be able to make its own vaccine, to contribute to the development, and make sure that we protect the population,” Mr. Sall said.

“What happened with COVID should never happen again in the sense that Africans should get vaccinated as a matter of equity.”

Jose Castillo, chief executive officer of Quantoom Biosciences, said the mRNA technologies allow low- and middle-income countries “to become autonomous in terms of research and development.”

The platform only needs 350 square metres (3,800 square feet) of space to have a manufacturing facility capable of making tens of millions of doses.

“Many people in many countries did not have the access they would have needed for them to be vaccinated on time” during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“So we think that this technology will have a tremendous impact in terms of autonomy through regional manufacturing.”

With $8.3 billion to give away in 2023, the Gates Foundation is the largest private philanthropic donor.

And with an endowment of more than $70 billion, its spending power is likely to continue for many decades.

It has spent billions of dollars to vaccinate against polio, treat and prevent malaria and HIV and more recently advance vaccines for diseases like cholera.