Melinda French Gates will give US$250M to women's health groups globally through a new open call

Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, poses for photographers as she arrives for a meeting after a meeting on the sideline of the gender equality conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris, July 1, 2021. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

Melinda French Gates will grant US$250 million to support women's health around the world through an open call for nonprofits to apply for funding.

The pledge announced Wednesday 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, US$1 billion commitment that French Gates made 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” to a likely new focus on funding women’s health globally. Previously, Pivotal had primarily funded organizations working to advance women's power in the U.S.

“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," Ley said, speaking of French Gates, who also has 20 years of experience funding global health through the Gates Foundation.

Lever for Change, a nonprofit 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 French Gates and billionaire author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to award US$40 million in 2019 to support nonprofits building women's power in the U.S. Scott then also gave away US$640 million to community-based nonprofits in March through a similar open call.

This new open call will give at least 100 nonprofit organizations around the world between US$1 million and US$5 million in unrestricted funding. It will prioritize giving to organizations for whom that amount will make a big difference, though there is no restriction on the size of the organizations who are eligible to apply. The deadline for nonprofits to register for the open call is Dec. 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.

“Most of philanthropy remains invitation-only decision making behind closed doors,” said Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change. “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 US$10 million over five years, but now, they are also supporting donors who are interested in scaling a field.

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

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 emphasized are also critical.

The Associated Press receives financial support for news coverage in Africa from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and for news coverage of women in the workforce and in statehouses from Pivotal Ventures.

When French Gates first announced her US$1 billion commitment in May, she detailed US$200 million in new grants to groups working in the U.S. to protect women’s rights and advance their power and influence. She also gave 12 individuals US$20 million each to donate however they chose and said she would announce an open call to give away US$250 million this fall.

In an op-ed in the New York Times in May, she wrote about 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.”

Historically, giving to organizations that serve women and girls has represented less than two per cent of all charitable gifts in the U.S. On Tuesday, the Women & Girls Index, which tracks gifts to these organizations, found they received US$10.2 billion in philanthropic support in 2021, the latest year of complete giving data available.

In raw dollars, that figure is a milestone, said Jacqueline Ackerman, interim director the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. But she said, over ten years 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 stepping up donations from everyone who cares about these issues across the income and wealth spectrums,” she said.

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.