Bezos, Gates, and other donors pledge $2 billion to tackle child malnutrition
Summary
The multiyear financial commitments were made the Nutrition for Growth Summit in Paris on Thursday.
Nearly a dozen foundations and philanthropists including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his parents, Jackie and Miguel Bezos, the Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, pledged more than $2 billion to address global child malnutrition at an event in Paris on Thursday evening.
The financial commitments were announced at a Nutrition for Growth Summit event co-hosted by the Washington nonprofit Stronger Foundations for Nutrition—which works with philanthropies globally to direct funding to nutritional interventions—and the OECD Network of Foundations Working for Development.
The pledges come as U.S. international aid for global nutrition—which has ranged as high as $5 billion a year, according to the congressional Research Service—is facing severe cutbacks as President Donald Trump’s administration aims to cut this funding.
The government’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development—which administers food aid through several programs—was blocked by a Maryland district judge on March 18 as “likely unconstitutional." But the government has appealed the decision and the future of food aid remains uncertain.
The funds pledged by the Bezos family, Gates, Rockefeller, and others are substantial, but remain “woefully insufficient" to replace the loss of U.S. funding, Matt Freeman, Stronger Foundations for Nutrition’s executive director, told Barron’s.
Instead, these donors view their contributions as creating space for other funders to step in—including governments, philanthropists, or development financial institutions—“to align resources in ways that can be greater than the sum of their parts," Freeman said.
For some of the funders, the dollars they pledged Thursday in Paris are being invested in programs and strategies that have worked for a long time.
The Gates Foundation, for example, has focused on improving nutrition for mothers and children for some time. On Thursday, it made an additional $750 million commitment over four years “to scale up access for mothers and children to essential nutrition through the health system, fortify commonly consumed foods with essential micronutrients and vitamins, and expand access to safe, nutritious, and affordable diets year-round," according to a news release.
The Bezos family, meanwhile, plans to donate up to $500 million to Unicef USA for the Child Nutrition Fund, a UNICEF-led program. Jeff Bezos and his parents, Jackie and Miguel, each have pledged $250 million.
Through the Child Nutrition Fund, every dollar a government spends to buy therapeutic nutrition for women and children is matched with a $2 donation.
Other funders announcing pledges on Thursday included the independent U.K. Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which intends to commit at least $400 million by the end of 2028, to initiatives such as the Child Nutrition Fund and the End School Age Hunger Fund. And the Rockefeller Foundation pledged $100 million to reach 100 million children in more than a dozen countries in the next five years.
The Nutrition for Growth Summit is hosted ever four years by the country that hosts the Olympic Games, with the aim of mobilizing political and financial commitments to address malnutrition.
Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com
