The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — renamed simply the Gates Foundation in January 2025 as it marked its 25th year — is the largest private philanthropic funder of global health and development research in the world. For research administrators and investigators outside the US federal system, it is a distinctive funder to work with: it runs almost no unified, always-open competition, is organized around problem areas rather than academic disciplines, and mixes large invitation-only awards to established institutions with a genuinely open competitive program, Grand Challenges. This guide covers how the foundation is structured, what its three most research-relevant program areas actually fund, how proposals reach the foundation in practice, and the administrative terms — indirect cost caps and open access requirements — that apply once a grant is made.
What the Gates Foundation Is
The foundation was established in 2000 through the merger of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, and operates as a private foundation under Bill Gates, with Warren Buffett among its major historical donors. Melinda French Gates stepped down as co-chair in 2024 to launch her own philanthropic venture, Pivotal Ventures, and the foundation adopted its shortened name, Gates Foundation, in January 2025; “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” remains the legal and widely searched former name, and both names refer to the same organization. By the end of 2024 the foundation’s endowment stood at more than $77.2 billion, and it operated with an $8.74 billion budget in 2025 as part of a stated path toward roughly $9 billion in annual grantmaking. Bill Gates has publicly committed the foundation to spending down and ceasing operations by the end of 2045 — a fixed-lifespan structure that distinguishes it from perpetual foundations and is worth noting for institutions building multi-decade relationships with it.
Grantmaking is organized into four global divisions: Global Health, Global Development, Global Growth & Opportunity plus Gender Equality, and a domestic U.S. Program (early learning, K-12 education, and Pacific Northwest community investment). The three areas named in this guide’s title — Global Health, Global Development, and Discovery & Translational Sciences — are where the bulk of the foundation’s externally facing research funding sits, and where most university and NGO research offices will actually encounter the foundation.
Global Health: Vaccines, Infectious Disease, and Primary Care
Global Health is the foundation’s largest and most established division. It funds research and delivery work across vaccine development, infectious diseases including tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, polio eradication, maternal, newborn, and child health, nutrition, and primary health care systems in low- and middle-income countries. Grantees range from academic research groups and product development partnerships (organizations that manage a specific drug, vaccine, or diagnostic pipeline on the foundation’s behalf) to multilateral bodies such as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which the foundation funds and works alongside rather than operates.
Global Development: Agriculture, Financial Inclusion, and WASH
Global Development funds work aimed at reducing poverty directly rather than through health interventions: agricultural research and smallholder-farmer productivity, financial inclusion (expanding access to savings, credit, and digital payments in low-income economies), water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure and research, and family planning. Much of this division’s research funding goes to agricultural research centers, national agricultural research systems, and development-economics research groups rather than to biomedical investigators, which makes it a distinct point of entry from Global Health for a research office advising faculty outside the health sciences.
Discovery and Translational Sciences
Discovery and Translational Sciences sits within Global Health and is the program area most directly aimed at academic and biotech researchers. Its stated purpose is to catalyze innovation in the discovery and translation of solutions to global health inequity, and it deliberately funds higher-risk, potentially disruptive work that a conventional peer-reviewed grant program might not prioritize. It is organized around two scientific focus areas — Drugs, Vaccines & Biologics (pipeline development for interventional products) and Reproductive Health Technologies — supported by three functional domains:
- Translational Sciences, which moves discoveries from early research toward practical, deployable products.
- Global Health Discovery Collaboratory, which gives foundation grantees shared access to technology platforms and fosters a collaborative research network rather than each grantee building capacity independently.
- Global Partnerships & Grand Challenges, which sources innovation globally and builds research-and-development capacity, with a particular emphasis on expanding a locally led ecosystem in low- and middle-income countries.
The foundation also operates the Gates Medical Research Institute, a nonprofit biotech it established to move some of its own discovery-stage work through clinical development, and partners with major research funders and product development partnerships across this program area.
How Funding Actually Works: Grand Challenges vs. Direct Investment
This is the point where the Gates Foundation differs most from a federal agency, and where research offices most often misjudge how to approach it. The foundation is not a traditional open-call funder across the board: most of its grantmaking is direct, targeted investment — the foundation identifies an institution, product development partnership, or investigator working on a priority problem and negotiates a grant directly, rather than running a standing competition that any qualified applicant can enter. Unsolicited full proposals are generally not reviewed outside an open call.
Grand Challenges is the deliberate exception: an open request-for-proposals platform, run through gcgh.grandchallenges.org and the broader Grand Challenges network, that has funded research teams globally across successive rounds. Each call has its own topic, eligibility rules, page limits, and deadline, and proposals can only be submitted through the online portal during an open round — applications by email or outside a round are not reviewed. A research office advising a faculty member interested in Gates Foundation funding should treat “watch for an open Grand Challenges call in the relevant topic area” as the realistic entry point, rather than assuming a standing proposal pathway exists. Applications, once a call is open, are submitted through the foundation’s own portal at submit.gatesfoundation.org. The foundation also publishes a public, searchable database of its committed grants, which is a useful diligence tool for identifying which of your institution’s peers or competitors the foundation has already funded in a given area before approaching it.
Indirect Cost Policy
Grants from the Gates Foundation follow the foundation’s own indirect cost policy (in effect since February 2017) rather than an institution’s federally negotiated indirect cost rate agreement (NICRA), and the two are calculated on different bases, not just at different percentages: the foundation classifies dedicated project management and support staff as direct costs, where federal Uniform Guidance treats comparable costs as indirect. Under the policy, indirect costs are calculated as budgeted indirect costs divided by budgeted total direct costs, with maximum — not guaranteed — rates that vary by grantee type: 0% for government agencies and other private foundations; up to 10% for US universities and community colleges; and up to 15% for NGOs, multilateral organizations, non-US universities, and for-profit organizations. Research offices building a Gates Foundation budget should expect a lower recovered rate than their federal NICRA and should not assume the foundation will match it. See our detailed comparison of foundation vs. federal indirect cost rates for how the Gates policy stacks up against Ford, MacArthur, and a typical federal NICRA side by side.
Open Access Requirements
The Gates Foundation was one of the first major funders to mandate immediate open access with a CC BY license for all funded research, and its policy has changed materially over time. Under the current (2025) policy, the foundation no longer pays article processing charges (APCs) on behalf of grantees — a reversal of the funding support it provided under the 2015 and 2021 versions of the policy — and instead directs authors toward no-fee green and no-fee gold routes, including a specific multi-year partnership with PLOS that lets Gates-funded authors publish APC-free. Any institution with active or anticipated Gates funding should budget publication costs accordingly rather than assuming the foundation will cover an APC as it once did. See our full guide to the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy for the complete compliance requirements.
How the Gates Foundation Compares to Peer Foundations
Research offices that work with the Gates Foundation are typically managing a broader private-foundation portfolio alongside it. For comparison, see our guides to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (basic science and environmental conservation, largely invitation-based), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (biomedical science and open-source research tools), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (career awards for biomedical researchers), the Mastercard Foundation (higher-education and research funding in Africa), and the LEGO Foundation (play-based learning research). Our broader landscape guide to private and nonprofit medical research funders places the Gates Foundation in that wider context.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Gates Foundation the same organization as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?
Yes. The foundation adopted the shortened name “Gates Foundation” in January 2025, coinciding with its 25th anniversary and Melinda French Gates’s departure as co-chair the previous year. It is the same legal organization and EIN; older grant agreements, tax filings, and citations referencing “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” remain valid and refer to the current Gates Foundation.
Does the Gates Foundation accept unsolicited research proposals?
Generally no. Outside an open Grand Challenges round, the foundation does not review unsolicited full proposals; most non-Grand-Challenges funding results from the foundation directly approaching or negotiating with an institution or investigator working in a priority area. Researchers interested in foundation funding should monitor gcgh.grandchallenges.org for open calls in their field rather than submitting an unsolicited application through a general contact channel.
What is Grand Challenges, and how is it different from the foundation’s other grants?
Grand Challenges is the foundation’s open, competitive request-for-proposals mechanism, run in successive topic-specific rounds through an online portal. It is the one part of the foundation’s grantmaking that functions like a standard competitive grant program with a defined application, deadline, and eligibility criteria that any qualifying team can enter, in contrast to the direct, invitation-based investments that make up most of the foundation’s giving.
Does Discovery and Translational Sciences fund basic research, or only clinical/product development?
Both, but with a translational orientation. It funds early discovery work through its Global Health Discovery Collaboratory and Grand Challenges mechanisms, and supports moving those discoveries toward deployable drugs, vaccines, biologics, and reproductive health technologies through its Translational Sciences function and partnerships including the Gates Medical Research Institute. The unifying criterion is relevance to global health inequity, not basic-versus-applied status alone.
What indirect cost rate will a Gates Foundation grant actually pay?
It depends on grantee type, and it is a maximum, not a guarantee: up to 10% for US universities and community colleges, up to 15% for NGOs, non-US universities, multilateral organizations, and for-profit grantees, and 0% for government agencies and other private foundations. This is calculated against budgeted total direct costs under the foundation’s own definitions, not against an institution’s federal NICRA rate, and the two will typically not match.
