Gates Foundation urges ultra-rich to give away more wealth

The Gates Foundation has issued a fresh call to the world’s billionaires to give away more of their wealth, saying they could save millions of lives if they parted with just 0.5% of their assets.

“Giving now, at scale, can make a very big difference,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman. “Philanthropy can be catalytic, and take risks government can’t,” he said in his annual letter in which he makes the case for greater philanthropic investments to improve health and combat poverty.

The Gates Foundation, chaired by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his former wife Melinda French Gates, is the world’s wealthiest philanthropic foundation, and has committed to spending down its $67bn endowment after the deaths of its co-chairs.

The Gates are also co-founders of the Giving Pledge launched with US businessperson Warren Buffett in 2010, to try to persuade fellow billionaires to promise to give away at least half their wealth during their lifetimes or in their wills.

Only four of the 241 billionaires who have signed the pledge are from Africa — SA’s Patrice Motsepe, Sudan-born Mo Ibrahim, Tanzania’s Mohammed Dewji and Zimbabwe’s Strive Masiyiwa. SA-born Tesla CEO Elon Musk has given away less than 1% of his wealth, according to Forbes.

According to Suzman, the need for philanthropy had deepened in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which stalled or reversed nearly two decades of progress in tackling global poverty and disease, as many developing countries lacked the resources to tackle these problems.

“It is now abundantly clear that Covid-19 represents a ‘before and after’ for large parts of the global south and the majority of African countries,” he said. “Many pay more in debt servicing than in health funding. We feel it is incredibly important that the one group that has seen its assets increase — the world’s billionaires — takes action,” he said.

If the world’s 2,640 billionaires, who have a combined net worth of at least $12.2-trillion, gave away just $1bn more than they do already, they could fund interventions that would save the lives of an extra 2-million mothers and babies by 2030, Suzman wrote in his letter, published on Thursday.

With an extra $4bn they could help 500-million small-scale farmers become more climate resilient, and with just over $7bn they could provide vaccines to 300-million people and prevent 7-million deaths. Giving away just 0.5% of their wealth — $61bn — could achieve these goals, and more, said Suzman.

“Giving now, at scale, can make a very big difference and can be hugely impactful,” he said.

The Gates Foundation announced at the World Economic Forum earlier in January that its board of trustees had approved a record budget of $8.6bn for 2024, as part of its commitment to increase its annual payout to $9bn by 2026.

Suzman said he was optimistic about the growth of philanthropy, including in Africa.

“Some of the models that came out of Covid-19, such as the Solidarity Fund in SA, are really important models that we can build upon,” he said. The Solidarity Fund was established to raise money to help the government tackle the Covid-19 crisis.

kahnt@businesslive.co.za