The Gates Foundation: The single biggest source of non-governmental funding to universities in the world?

Today the UK government hosts the GAVI Vaccine Summit 2020. Bringing together governments, business and civil society, the goal of the GAVI Summit is to raise at least US$7.5 billion to help expand vaccine and immunisation programmes against a range of infectious diseases like measles, typhoid and polio.

One of the biggest actors at the table today is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, well known for its remarkable philanthropic contribution, particularly to healthcare science and research. The founders have been eloquent in their wish to make a contribution on developing high-impact interventions against the leading causes of death – notably malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and enteric and diarrheal disease.

Recently we undertook an analysis of giving by the Gates Foundation to universities and higher education institutions over the five past reported years (2014-18). Universities are at the vanguard of scientific research, and Gates funding is an important driver in this mission. The purpose of our research was to look at the spread of Gates giving; where does their money go, and to which institutions?

Our starting point for this search was not the grants database on the Gates Foundation website. There is no reliable filter on that database to assemble the full list of universities Gates has supported. So we turned to the Foundation’s US tax returns, known as PF990s to start piecing together a picture. This was a much bigger exercise than we could possibly have imagined! We poured through thousands of pages of tax returns identifying payments made to universities and higher education institutions.

The upshot from this exercise was that we identified 392 universities in 51 countries receiving $6.02bn in philanthropy from the Gates Foundation between 2014-18. According to our calculations this represents around 30% of all Gates Foundation giving during this period. The Gates Foundation, of course, gives to many other causes, non-profits and scientific research establishments aside from universities.

The scale of university philanthropy is quite staggering. And there are some surprises which we will be sharing in the coming weeks on this blog. But our take-away from this exercise is that the Gates Foundation is probably the single biggest source of non-governmental funding to universities in the world over the past 20 years. True, we can’t evidence that, but based on this sort of giving in the past five years, it is very hard to find any other organisation that can match the university giving power of the Gates Foundation.

AW