The biggest bet yet on women’s health
The numbers speak for themselves: 257 million women want contraception and cannot get it. That’s not a ‘market gap’. It’s a political and economic failure played out in operating theatres, maternity wards and kitchens across the world.
The Gates Foundation has decided to go big, $2.5 billion over the next five years, its largest-ever commitment to women’s health. The money will back more than 40 innovations, from AI-guided ultrasounds to hormonal IUDs for heavy menstrual bleeding, from drugs tackling the root causes of preeclampsia to the kind of simple, life-saving tools that don’t make headlines but change survival rates e.g a low-cost drape to measure postpartum blood loss, rapid HIV/syphilis tests, self-injectable contraceptives.
This is not just a research portfolio. It’s an attempt to correct decades of neglect. As Dr Anita Zaidi, head of the foundation’s gender equality division, puts it, women’s health conditions are still “misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or ignored.” The investment targets five areas: obstetric care and maternal immunisation; maternal nutrition; gynaecological and menstrual health; contraceptive innovation; and sexually transmitted infections.
Zaidi is clear that contraception remains central, but innovation means more than novelty. It means methods with fewer side effects, more control, and flexibility as women’s needs change over a lifetime. It also means breaking the bottleneck where promising science dies in the lab for want of funding, coordination, or political will.
And it means delivery. “Just developing new tools is insufficient,” Zaidi says. “Ensuring they are delivered into the hands of women who need them most is critical.” Without that, the $2.5 billion becomes an expensive lesson in how not to do global health.
The Gates Foundation’s bet is that by funding both the science and the systems, the pipeline and the pathways, if you like, it can move the dial. If it works, the return won’t be measured in profit margins. It will be measured in lives lived with greater health, choice and dignity.
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