$100bn Spent On Healthcare In 25 Years Strengthened Partnerships In Nigeria, Others — Bill Gates

The Chair of the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, has said that the $100 billion spent by the foundation in the last 25 years to improve healthcare in Africa has helped to develop partnerships in Nigeria and other countries on the continent.

Gates disclosed this at Goalkeepers, a live event organised by the Gates Foundation in Lagos on Wednesday.

He explained that when the Foundation started in 2000, the basic guiding principle was that all lives have equal value, with a major concern about reducing infant mortality globally, especially in Africa.

“And so I looked and I said, okay. Are people taking this seriously, are they making the medicines cheaper, or are they tailoring the medicines to the particular needs of those areas, for example, investing in new malaria tools? And the answer was no.

“And so, that became the guiding light for the Gates Foundation. Over 70 per cent of what we’ve spent, the $100 billion we’ve spent in these last 25 years, went to global health, and throughout that 25 years, we’ve developed the partnerships, throughout Africa,” he said

“Here in Nigeria, we’ve had amazing partners who understand the delivery and the way that we can work and help the government. The government, in the long run, has the responsibility for all of this work. We’re there to accelerate these systems,” he added.

Chair of the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, and Gombe State Governor, Inuwa Yahaya (middle), at the Goalkeepers event in Lagos on Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Gates noted that improving health accelerates the economic growth of a country to a point where it can become self-sufficient. He expressed optimism that the global child mortality rate can be reduced by 50 per cent from the current five million cases worldwide.

He explained, “These next 20 years, you know, the countries in Africa will get to that status. So helping them accelerate that, helping them understand what the unique local challenges are, which things we need to make simpler, and bring the price down. That’s done, as a partnership, and the last 25 years went way better than I expected; that is, childhood death, globally and in Africa, was cut in more than half.

“We went from almost 10 million worldwide to now less than five million. And I feel confident we can cut that in half again, even though, as you mentioned, right now, we’re in a stunning and completely unjust withdrawal of support from a number of rich governments, including the United States, but even despite that, which is going to make the next four or five years, we’ll have some reversal because it’s just too large and too sudden to overcome. We will get back to incredible progress reducing those.”