Gates Foundation: Biggest mistakes by EU grant applicants

BRUSSELS — Like many people in European Union development circles, Nuria Molina used to apply for grants at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now she helps decide who gets them. Before taking up her Brussels-based position at the foundation as senior program officer for the EU and the Netherlands in 2016, Molina held senior roles at ActionAid, Save the Children, and the European Network on Debt and Development, or Eurodad — all of which receive funding from the Gates Foundation. Her advice to those seeking money from the foundation? Do your homework, and be realistic. “It helps everybody to have a very candid conversation on expectations, because otherwise everybody wastes a lot of time on conversations that aren’t going anywhere,” she told Devex. “Some NGOs try to get a partnership with the foundation on an issue where there is no alignment.” Instead, she advised organizations to learn “what our priorities and strategies are … If there is no overlap, let’s not try to force it.” “We don’t ask our grantees to share 100 percent our views.” --— Nuria Molina, senior program officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Working in the same area as one of the foundation’s 36 strategies is not enough, Molina said. “Our financial inclusion strategy is very focused on a couple of very specific things. If you are working on financial inclusion, and you do these two things, yes, spend your time, invest in trying to get a partnership with our foundation. But if not, it’s not really worth it.” “What I encounter often in my current role is partners that, just because they know that we are very big, and in the greater scheme of things we have a lot of resources, they try and try and try, and actually that’s a waste of everybody’s time,” she said. ‘The big millions in Europe go to research’ Molina said it is wrong to equate the foundation’s work with that of an NGO or think-tank. “We are a donor which is as big as the Netherlands, and bigger than Luxembourg, bigger than Belgium, bigger than Spain, bigger than most European donors,” she said. A commission official told a hearing at the European Parliament last month that it considers foundations as part of civil society, but also “fellow donors in some cases.” Many development actors in Brussels benefit from Gates’ support, including the European NGO confederation CONCORD (nearly $700,000 over about three years); Eurodad ($2.2 million over three years); European Parliamentary Forum ($1.5 million over three years on family planning); and Oxfam ($1 million over about three years, sent via Oxfam US). But “the big millions in Europe go to research,” Molina said, citing partnerships with universities in the United Kingdom, polio research in Antwerp, and work on agriculture in the Netherlands. Despite the foundation’s deep pockets, she said “tough choices” have to be made. New CONCORD director Tanya Cox recently told Devex that the foundation would no longer support the NGO confederation’s work on gender equality. Molina said this is because the Gates Foundation gender strategy is prioritizing other countries, with a focus on the U.N. General Assembly and G-7, for instance. “The European Commission has not been prioritized as the top target for our engagement with gender,” Molina said. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t engage with them [on gender], but usually our resources for advocacy ... match our strategy.” The foundation’s’ EU advocacy priorities mirror its partnerships with EU institutions, Molina said. These include DeSIRA, or Development-Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture; research and development on health issues; the vaccine alliance, Gavi; the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and human capital. Gates also contributed $50 million to the European Fund for Sustainable Development, teaming with the European Investment Bank to try and strengthen diagnostic health services in sub-Saharan Africa. The European Commission wants to greatly expand the EFSD model under the EU’s 2021-2027 budget, despite reservations from some stakeholders and has hailed the Gate Foundation’s support as a vote of confidence in its approach to stimulating private investment in Africa. “[The commission] have their views and we have ours,” Molina said, adding that the plan has “a lot of potential and a lot of risk … Will we work more with the Commission on the EFSD? Well, it depends on how this one goes. We have lots of hopes, but we haven’t rolled out yet.” The current EFSD project, known as the European Health Guarantee Platform for Africa, was one of the “very exceptional cases” where the Gates Foundation gave money to a donor government, she said. Some organizations that the Gates Foundation supports, such as Eurodad, have also been critical of EFSD. But Molina said the image some have of the foundation as a “donor moving behind-the-scenes and controlling everybody” is false. “We don’t ask our grantees to share 100 percent our views, particularly if it’s in an area where we don’t fund them,” she said. The foundation’s grant to Eurodad is primarily focused on its aid effectiveness work. Lobbying or advocacy? Another consideration for potential grantees is that some policy areas are “too politically sensitive for large institutional donors like the Gates Foundation,” Molina said. “There is a very clear but fine line between what under U.S. law is considered lobbying — which is interfering in legislative processes — and what is considered not to be lobbying, technically, but only advocacy,” she explained. The foundation is only allowed to engage in the latter, Molina said, and it declared costs for 2018 of between €200,000-300,000 ($226,000-339,000) relevant to the EU Transparency Register, including meetings with commission officials and participating in conferences. Telling the commission how to draft its next aid instrument or research and innovation program “are completely prohibited and that we don’t do,” Molina said. Acceptable advocacy could involve general, long-term calls for more money to be spent on aid, global health, and research, she added. The foundation is allowed to be more involved, however, when its own money is on the line. “When we become donors of a fund, like the EFSD, then of course we can say what we think about the fund,” she said. “Because our money is at stake and we want our money to be successful, risks factored into the strategy, all that.” This year, Devex will be exploring philanthropy in Europe — how the landscape differs from the U.S., who the big players are, how they interact with donors, and how you can partner with them.