Devex Invested: Unpacking Bill Gates’ pledge to spend $200B by 2045

You can’t take it with you when you’re gone. Just ask Bill Gates.

The global development world is still processing the announcement last week that the Gates Foundation will sunset on Dec. 31, 2045, having spent another $200 billion (on top of the roughly $100 billion it has spent to date, on global health, advocacy, and much else). Gates issued a statement, gave an interview to The New York Times, and didn’t sugarcoat things for an audience in New York last week.

“We are in an incredible crisis,” he said at the event, attended by Devex. “The funding cuts, the money that's been cut off from the U.S. in a very abrupt way, the pressure on Europe, where partly to raise their defense budgets, they're cutting their aid budgets, where they've been the most generous over time — it is tragic.”

We asked nonprofit accounting expert, professor Brian Mittendorf from Ohio State University, for his take on the Gates announcement.

Q: What are the main things you expect to change now?

A: In terms of the day-to-day operations of the foundation, I don’t see drastic differences beyond the increase in scale and speed of grants. It is not changing its focus notably, just the timeline. I also don’t see this drastically changing what other donors do. In the early days of the Gates Foundation and the Giving Pledge, the idea of a foundation this size being time-limited was ahead of the curve. However, a lot has changed since then. With sidestepping private foundations all together now being common among the wealthy and MacKenzie Scott now arguably being the face of rapid deployment of philanthropic funds, this decision by Mr. Gates is less radical than it once may have seemed.

Q: What key questions do you have about how this will work?

A: One strange aspect of the Giving Pledge is that we have seen many philanthropists’ wealth grow in ways that have made it difficult to spend down as quickly as their stated intent. With that in mind, I am curious about the organization’s annual benchmarks and how closely they will hold themselves to them.

Q: Final take?

A: As I think about the Gates Foundation and its legacy, I also wonder how this decision to speed up its spend-down will ultimately compare to Warren Buffett’s decision not to leave his entire wealth to the foundation. In many ways, the Gates Foundation has been hard to separate from Mr. Buffett’s own giving, but recent years have seen that shift dramatically. In that sense, I think the long-term impact of this venture also depends on the decisions Mr. Buffett’s children make in their own philanthropic endeavors.

Read: Risk-averse Gates bets his fortune on the future

See also: Bill Gates commits most of his fortune to Gates Foundation, closing 2045

Milken it

U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda was top of mind at the 28th Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles last week, too. But it was tariffs, not foreign aid cuts, that dominated the conversations.

“The developing world tends to have higher tariffs and higher nontariff barriers,” World Bank President Ajay Banga said at the event. “So what I'm trying to tell them is use the political tailwind that a crisis is creating in your country to try and make a change on your approach to tariffs and nontariff barriers.”

Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar caught up with the French development agency AFD’s boss Rémy Rioux too, who did nothing to dampen expectations for the fourth United Nations’ Financing for Development conference in Spain at the end of next month.

“The old paradigm is broken,” Rioux said. “We are in the process of defining a new one.”

Read more: Anxiety over tariffs and aid cuts spills into Milken

+ Curious about how philanthropy can go beyond being performative and actually be impactful? Don’t miss Raj’s no-holds-barred Devex Pro briefing with Mulago Foundation CEO Kevin Starr tomorrow at 12 p.m. ET (6 p.m. CET). The conversation will cut through conference platitudes to deliver actionable insights for forward-thinking leaders determined to shape development's future rather than merely react to it. Register now to secure your spot.

Hush-hush climate

The Asian Development Bank has long branded itself as “Asia and the Pacific’s climate bank.” But that title was nowhere to be heard at its annual meeting in Milan, Italy, last week, Devex contributor Alessio Perrone reports.

The term “climate change” was hardly uttered, either. Alessio counted how many sessions used the word “climate” in their titles: zero. For comparison, it appeared 12 times in session titles at last year’s meeting in Tbilisi, Georgia — or about a quarter of all events. Meanwhile, a webpage once titled “Asia and the Pacific’s Climate Bank” was live on the bank’s site as recently as October 2024, but appears to have been taken down and now redirects to a more generic landing page. (Here’s what it used to look like.)

Some bank critics and climate advocates tell Alessio that the omission stems from a broader climate of pressure from the Trump administration to bar use of the word “climate” by organizations it funds. The United States is tied with Japan as ADB’s biggest shareholder, with each holding 15.6%. And although the U.S. has not publicly singled out ADB, it has undertaken a 180-day review of the United States’ membership in all multilateral institutions. The U.S. sent representatives to Milan but did not make public statements there.

Meanwhile, the halls in Milan were abuzz with questions on whether ADB is sticking to its climate promises as it downplays its climate work overall. Back in 2021, the bank announced it planned to invest $100 billion in climate finance between 2019 and 2030, and last year it committed $12.3 billion in climate finance, including 60% to climate mitigation efforts.

“One U.S. election shouldn’t rewrite joint international commitments or the ADB’s own strategies. Trump may be gone by 2030, but the climate crisis won’t be,” Jörn Brömmelhörster, a former principal climate change specialist at ADB who retired in 2017, tells Alessio. ADB, for its part, did not respond to Devex’s questions on the topic.

Read: Is ADB still Asia and the Pacific’s ‘climate bank’?

Recipe for growth

ADB also used its annual meeting to announce it would expand its investments in food systems to $26 billion by 2030, with a total support of $40 billion between 2022 and 2030. Of the newly announced amount, $18.5 billion will go to governments and $7.5 billion will go to private sector investments, Alessio also reports.

Other multilateral development banks are getting more active in the sector too, with the African Development Bank and World Bank among those looking at food systems and nutrition as foundations of long-term economic development. Every $1 invested in addressing undernutrition has an expected return of $23, according to the World Bank’s Investment Framework for Nutrition 2024.

“Because we’re a development bank, we’re not used to feeding the hungry. That's not our job; it’s economic development,” F. Cleo Kawawaki, ADB’s director general of the department that manages agriculture and food operations, told Devex in Paris recently. But Kawawaki added that “with the investment in nutrition, you're maximizing the value of the most important resource you have, that is human capital.”

Read: How ADB plans to invest $40B in food systems by 2030 (Pro)

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EBRD stays home

The annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is starting today in … London, its hometown. Why don’t more banks do that, we wonder?

We asked Nina Lesikhina, policy officer at the watchdog CEE Bankwatch Network, what her group is tracking from the meeting, which comes as EBRD is drafting its next Strategic and Capital Framework.

Lesikhina nominated the bank’s approach to the green transition — remember, unlike the European Investment Bank, EBRD still does gas projects in some cases — and the ongoing revision of its gender and inclusion strategies.

Plus, as it expands into sub-Saharan Africa and Iraq, the bank “must establish a robust framework to ensure effective remedy for unintended harm,” Lesikhina tells us, “particularly in contexts where such harm is hard to prevent and local accountability systems are weak.”

ICYMI: Nigeria becomes EBRD shareholder as it continues African expansion

What we’re reading

Philanthropy in Asia is on the rise, fueled by tech, unicorns, and booming financial markets. [Devex Pro]

The International Monetary Fund executive board on Friday approved a fresh $1.4 billion loan to Pakistan under its climate resilience fund. [Reuters]

Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye is aiming to attract $1.7 billion of investments to build digital infrastructure and create more job opportunities for young people in the country. [Bloomberg]