Bill and Melinda gates Foundation donations made (filtered to cause areas matching Global health)

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This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2026. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

• Basic donor info
• Donor statistics
• Donor donation amounts by cause area and year
• Donor donation amounts by subcause area and year
• Donor donation amounts by donee and year
• Donor donation amounts by influencer and year
• Donor donation amounts by country and year
• Donor donation amounts by disclosures and year
• Donor document list
• Donor donation list
• Similar donors

Basic donor information

Brief history: The Gates Foundation launched in 2000, with precursors starting in the 1990s, financed by the personal wealth of co-founder Bill Gates from Microsoft. Starting 2005, it scaled up its giving significantly after a large funding commitment from Warren Buffett

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: See https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Foundation-Factsheet for the grantmaking areas. The four grantmaking areas are the Global Development Program, Global Health Program, Global Policy and Advocacy, and United States Program. Within the United States Program the focus is on K-12 education, the Internet, and emergency relief

Notes on grant publication logistics: Although the Gates Foundation has a grants database on its website, as well as individual grant pages for every grant, we use the IATI data instead, because it can be processed programmatically (the data on the site does not allow for full data download or easy programmatic processing). This leads to a few problems: first, IATI data does not include grants made in the United States, since it focuses on development assistance (DA) spending. Second, IATI data is updated more infrequently. Third, it may sometimes omit some information that is present in the grants database

Donor donation statistics

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)

Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)

Donation amounts by subcause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given subcause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

For the meaning of “classified” and “unclassified”, see the page clarifying this.

Graph of spending by subcause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)

Graph of spending by subcause area and year (cumulative)

Donation amounts by donee and year