Gates Foundation looking to expand in Africa

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is set to “modestly” expand its presence in Ethiopia and Nigeria this year and is looking into opening new offices in both East and West Africa. “[These offices] are about helping to provide on-the-ground relationships in real time with government, with partners, with donors and with some of our grantees,” Mark Suzman, president of global policy and advocacy at the organization, told Devex in an exclusive interview in London. The expansion, however, will likely not lead to an international hiring boost, as Suzman pointed out that the foundation’s core operating model — relying on partners to implement programs on the ground — is not set to change. “We’re not going to become a big field operating agency comparable to a U.N. agency,” he said, despite the fact that the organization has experienced a “growth spurt” over the past five years and now currently employs more than 1,200 people. In recent years, the Gates Foundation has opened representations in India and China in Asia, as well as Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa in Africa. These offices are relatively small and serve as brokers rather than implementers of programs funded by international grants, the bulk of which are in Africa. The organization is trying to strike a balance between practical factors like more staff located away from the Seattle headquarters, 10 hours behind its partners in Africa and even more in Asia, and the need to maintain “lean” operations in country offices so they require only modest investments and can continue to serve “as a bit of a bridge between governments and more traditional bilateral and multilateral donors,” Suzman said. The Ethiopian government, for instance, called on the Gates Foundation to help figure out what investments it should make in the agriculture sector, leading to the creation in 2010 of an independent group, the Agriculture Transformation Agency. “That group has now become very successful in both generating a vision of agricultural investment across Ethiopia, including investment in seeds, soils, training and market creation,” Suzman explained. “And it has aligned a whole lot of donor funding in a much more unified way.” This form of “leveraged partnership” can work elsewhere too, he said. “We’re providing support now to both the Tanzanian and Nigerian agriculture ministries, based to some degree on that Ethiopian model, and we have state-level memoranda with both Bihar and Uttar Pradesh now, the two largest and poorest states in India,” the official noted. The Gates Foundation is a world leader in some fields, including agriculture and infectious diseases — but part of its appeal as a partner, Suzman stressed, is also its nonpolitical agenda: “We don’t really bring anything to the table other than our agenda to help the needs of the poorest.” Check out more insights and analysis provided to hundreds of Executive Members worldwide, and subscribe to the Development Insider to receive the latest news, trends and policies that influence your organization.