Bill Gates Gives $20 Billion to Stem ‘Significant Suffering'

Bill Gates, concerned about the “significant suffering” caused by global setbacks including the COVID-19 pandemic, announced that he will donate $20 billion to his foundation so it can increase its annual spending.

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The donation, combined with longtime board member Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett’s $3.1 billion gift last month, brings The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s endowment to approximately $70 billion, making it one of the largest, if not the largest in the world, depending on daily stock valuations. In an essay on the foundation’s website, Bill Gates said he hopes “others in positions of great wealth and privilege will step up in this moment too.”

The Gates Foundation plans to raise its annual budget by 50% over pre-pandemic levels to about $9 billion by 2026. The foundation hopes the increased spending will improve education, reduce poverty and reinstate the global progress toward ending preventable disease and achieving gender equality that has been halted in recent years.

According to the United Nations Development Program, 71 million people have been pushed into poverty since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, mainly due to food and energy price surges. Households in the Balkans, the Caspian Sea region and Sub-Saharan Africa have been hit particularly hard. The U.N. World Food Program reports that the number of acutely hungry people is now 345 million, up 25% since the start of the war in Ukraine.