Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donations made to Princeton University

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 2025. 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 information

ItemValue
Country United States
Wikipedia pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
Best overview URLhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
Facebook username gatesfoundation
LinkedIn username bill-&-melinda-gates-foundation
Websitehttps://www.gatesfoundation.org/
Donations URLhttps://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database
Twitter usernamegatesfoundation
Page on philosophy informing donationshttps://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do
Grant application process pagehttps://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Information/Grantseeker-FAQ
Regularity with which donor updates donations datacontinuous updates
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)irregular
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)years
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteSQL insertion commands generated by script https://github.com/riceissa/gates-foundation-iati-processing

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

Full donor page for donor Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country
Facebook page princetonu
Websitehttp://www.princeton.edu
Twitter usernameprinceton
Wikipedia pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University
Instagram usernameprinceton_university
Org Watch pagehttps://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Princeton+University

Full donee page for donee Princeton University

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 8 100,000 476,577 -9,384 0 100,000 100,000 100,000 100,000 230,000 517,180 1,300,000 1,474,823 1,474,823
Global health 7 100,000 470,777 -9,384 0 100,000 100,000 100,000 100,000 230,000 230,000 1,300,000 1,474,823 1,474,823
Public finance management (PFM) 1 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180 517,180

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.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2008
Global health (filter this donor) 7 3,295,439.00 -9,384.00 1,474,823.00 230,000.00 100,000.00 1,300,000.00 100,000.00 100,000.00
Public finance management (PFM) (filter this donor) 1 517,180.00 517,180.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Total 8 3,812,619.00 507,796.00 1,474,823.00 230,000.00 100,000.00 1,300,000.00 100,000.00 100,000.00

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

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Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)

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Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (8 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 8)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
517,180.0032017-10-12Public finance management (PFM)https://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to foster peer-to-peer learning about how governments in low-income countries can more effectively translate health and education priorities into budgets and mobilize domestic resources; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: Developing countries, unspecified.
-9,384.0082017-06-05Global health/Reproductive health carehttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to improve diagnosis of fetal brain injury by developing a highly sensitive assay that involves using smartphones to detect biomarkers from a drop of blood on an assay card for use by untrained individuals; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: Developing countries, unspecified.
1,474,823.0012016-05-25Global health/Medical researchhttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to develop a low cost, scalable platform based on Flash Nano Precipitation to prepare difficult-to-deliver therapeutics into powders for oral drug delivery; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: Developing countries, unspecified.
230,000.0042015-06-29Global health/infectious disease controlhttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to assess the ability of a new signal enhancement technology in significantly increasing the sensitivity of detecting Ebola virus antigens; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: Developing countries, unspecified.
100,000.0052014-10-27Global health/Reproductive health carehttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to improve diagnosis of fetal brain injury by developing a highly sensitive assay that involves using smartphones to detect biomarkers from a drop of blood on an assay card for use by untrained individuals; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: Developing countries, unspecified.
1,300,000.0022013-07-10Global health/infectious disease controlhttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to application of epidemiological models to guide and evaluate control of vaccine-preventable infections; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: South of Sahara|Developing countries, unspecified.
100,000.0052012-10-15Global health/malariahttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to profile red blood cells infected with the malarial parasite P. falciparum to characterize the metabolic pathways that are altered or targeted by the anti-malarial compounds.; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: South of Sahara.
100,000.0052008-10-06Global health/infectious disease controlhttps://iatiregistry.org/publisher/bmgf-- to create sentinel cells that can detect the presence of pathogens, report its identity with a biological signal, and secrete molecules to destroy it.; Aid type: Project-type interventions. Affected regions: Developing countries, unspecified.