Melinda French Gates will award $250 million to support women’s health around the world through an open call for nonprofits to apply for funding.
The pledge announced Wednesday marks a new chapter in her individual philanthropic giving since then deviate from the bill & Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year and is part of a two-year, Commitment of $1 billion that French Gates created in May to support women and families around the world.
Haven Ley, chief strategy officer at French Gates organization Pivotal Ventures, said the grant competition was a “curtain raiser” for a likely new focus on financing women’s health care worldwide. Previously, Pivotal primarily funded organizations working to increase the power of women in the US
“By focusing on women’s health, she has expanded her definition of women’s power to include the requirement that women must have their health to be powerful,” Ley said, speaking of French Gates, who also has 20 years of experience in financing global healthcare through the Gates. Foundation.
Lever for Change, a nonprofit of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is organizing the grant competition, called Action for Women’s Health. It has previously collaborated with both French Gates as a billionaire author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to award $40 million in 2019 to support nonprofits building women’s power in the US. Scott then gave away too $640 million to community nonprofits in March through a similar open call.
This new open call will give at least 100 nonprofits around the world between $1 million and $5 million in unrestricted funding. Priority will be given to giving to organizations for whom that amount will make a big difference, although there is no limit to the size of organizations eligible to apply. The deadline for nonprofits to register for the open call is December 3 and the deadline for application, assessment process and final decision runs until the end of 2025.
The lengthy process includes a peer review by other applicants and an external review by a panel of experts.
“The majority of philanthropy remains invitation-only decision-making behind closed doors,” said Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change. “And what we’ve developed is a way to make an open call, a way to broaden access to philanthropic opportunities, that is also a process that is humane and just.”
She said their original model focused on scaling a solution, with a minimum donor commitment of $10 million over five years, but now they also support donors interested in scaling a field.
Pivotal also purposefully considers a wide range of interventions related to women’s health, including mental health and healthcare menopauseLey said. They hope that learning where opportunities and gaps exist in funding and resources can help Pivotal design its new strategy, she said.
Sarah Baird, professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, studies the impact of different interventions on adolescents, especially girls, and what helps improve their well-being throughout their lives and that of their children.
In general, she would advise donors to work through existing institutions and have a broader focus rather than on a single disease. She pointed to mental health care for women and men as an area that is underfunded, along with gender-based violence and the overall economic benefits that come from being healthy enough for women to work.
“We won’t get far if we just focus on traditional pregnancy and traditional mortality,” she said, which she emphasized are also critical.
The Associated Press will receive financial support for reporting in Africa through the bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and for reporting on women in the workforce and in statehouses from Pivotal Ventures.
When French Gates first announced her $1 billion pledge in May, she gave $200 million in new grants to groups working in the US to protect women’s rights and increase their power and influence. She also gave 12 individuals $20 million each to donate however they wanted, and said she would announce an open call this fall to give away $250 million.
In a New York Times op-ed in May, she wrote about the open call: “I hope to engage groups with personal connections to the issues they are working on. People on the front lines must get the attention and investment they deserve, including from me.”
Historically, donations to organizations serving women and girls have represented less than 2% of all charitable giving in the US. Women & Girls Index, which tracks donations to these organizations, found that they received $10.2 billion in philanthropic support in 2021, the last year in which complete donation data was available.
In raw dollars, that figure is a milestone, said Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. But she said that after a decade of analyzing these gifts, giving to women and girls has never grown faster than overall giving.
“To surpass that really means not just the Melinda French Gateses, but increasing donations from everyone who cares about these issues across the income and wealth spectrum,” she said.
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