Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, United States of America

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is dedicated to improving people's lives by sharing advances in health and learning with the global community. The foundation was created in January of 2000, through the merger of the Gates Learning Foundation, which focused on expanding access to technology through public libraries, and the William H. Gates Foundation, which focused on improving global health.

In November 2000, the Foundation made a generous contribution of US$20 million towards the elimination of LF. Funds are held pending disbursement in a Trust Fund in the World Bank. At a meeting in early 2001, the groups participating in the use of the grant, comprising the Atlanta USA group (LF Support Center of Emory University, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Carter Center), the LF Support Centre, Liverpool, UK, WHO and the Non-Governmental Development Organizations group (led by InterChurch Medical Assistance), agreed on the following strategic outline for the use of the Gates grant:

• demonstration projects to show interruption of LF transmission; to move towards national level coverage; to develop, implement and evaluate Disability Prevention strategies; and to evaluate cost-effectiveness;
• to ensure national momentum by providing support to countries for mapping and country scale implementation of ELF programmes;
• to ensure global momentum through a development strategy covering regionalization, increase in the number of partners, advocacy and leverage of additional funding;
• evaluation and monitoring of the demonstration projects, the country programmes and the partnership development.

The implementation of the Gates grant is completed nd the Foundation has expressed its satisfaction with the current level of progress. A report is being prepared. A grant to the Task Force for Child Survival on behalf of the Global Alliance was made in late 2006 to undertake operartional research on the issues and challenges to programmes as elimination is closer to being achieved in may countries which commenced programmes in 2000/2001.