Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates told AFP last week it is ‘tragic’ that child deaths will increase worldwide for the first time this century because wealthy Western countries have slashed international aid.
The United States has made the deepest cuts, with Gates saying fellow billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was “responsible for a lot of deaths.”
However, Britain, France, and Germany have also ‘disproportionately’ slashed aid, Gates, a major funder of numerous global health programmes, said.
The cuts mean that the number of children dying before their fifth birthday is projected to increase to 4.8 million this year, up 200,000 since 2024, according to the Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report released last week.
Gates said it was a ‘tragedy’ to see child mortality rise after it had steadily fallen from around 10 million annual deaths at the turn of the millennium. Aid for developing countries has plummeted by 27 percent this year, threatening progress against a range of diseases including malaria, HIV, and polio.
If global aid cuts of around 30 percent are permanent, 16 million more children could die by 2045, according to modelling by the Gates-funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
While acknowledging that “rich world budgets are very tight,” Gates regretted that international aid was being ‘disproportionately’ targeted in European nations. He also expressed hope that new tools such as vaccines could bring child mortality rates back down in the next five years.
Other research by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health has determined that more than 22 million people could die from preventable deaths by 2030 due to the US and European aid cuts.
Jessica Sklair, who researches elite philanthropy at the Queen Mary University of London, told AFP that Gates already wielded “an enormous influence over the world of global health,” and the aid cuts would likely increase his level of influence, adding that it did not appear that private philanthropy will “step in to fill the gap.”
If developing nations like the Philippines know that they cannot count on private philanthropy to fill the gap that has been left by decreasing international aid, our government will have no choice but to to mobilize the resources necessary to prevent tragedies like child deaths. As the world order changes, so must nations move quickly to adapt to protect their own people, especially the vulnerable members of the population.*
