Melinda Gates Gives Global Women's Health Groups $250M in Grants

• Over 80 women's health organizations around the world received $250 million in grants from Melinda French Gates.
• The grants were part of the Action for Women's Health challenge

More than 80 organizations providing women's health care worldwide have received a total of $250 million in grants from Melinda French Gates after a year-long application process.

Most of the recipients of the Action for Women's Health Challenge had never been funded before by Pivotal, her organization, or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which she founded with Bill Gates, French Gates said. She stepped away from the Gates Foundation last year.

"The world will benefit from seeing what happens when organizations like these are no longer chronically underfunded," French Gates said in written comments to the Associated Press, which receives support from Pivotal for reporting.

The grants, each ranging from $1 million to $5 million, were given out based on an open global competition for nonprofit organizations. The process, which the Chicago-based nonprofit Lever for Change runs, attracted more than 4,000 applications from 119 countries.

According to CEO Cecilia Conrad, this not only underlines global interest in women's health but also seeks to raise the visibility for these organizations among other funders.

This represents the second-largest funding competition Lever for Change has held, after MacKenzie Scott handed out $640 million to U.S. community-based nonprofits in March 2024.

For the Likhaan Center for Women's Health in the Philippines, the $5 million grant represents nearly a decade of their current funding stream, according to Executive Director Junice Melgar, who said it recognizes the center's community-based methods of providing health care and advocating for policy change in low-income areas.

The funding is part of a commitment from French Gates to spend $1 billion on grants promoting women's rights and gender equity.

In addition to these grants, she has distributed $20 million to 12 grantees she then matched with nonprofits of their choice and has committed $150 million to advance gender equity in workplaces.

Other grantees include Mujeres Aliadas, a Michoacán, Mexico-based nonprofit that will continue its work training midwives and educating women and teens about reproductive health.

Per Executive Director Lisel Lifshitz, this grant couldn't come at a better time; with reductions in funding, this flexible grant will sustain operations at their organization.