On June 2 while addressing an audience in the Nelson Mandela Hall at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Bill Gates – the world’s second richest person and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – announced that a significant portion of his nearly $200bn fortune would be directed towards improving primary healthcare and education across Africa over the next two decades. This extraordinary philanthropic pledge is expected to fulfil a commitment he made on May 8 to donate “virtually all” of his wealth before the Gates Foundation permanently closes on December 31, 2045.
Former Mozambique first lady Graca Machel, a renowned humanitarian and global advocate for women’s and children’s rights, attended the event and welcomed the announcement. Describing the continent’s current situation as at a “moment of crisis”, she declared: “We are counting on Mr Gates’s steadfast commitment to continue walking this path of transformation alongside us.”
The Gates Foundation has operated in Africa for more than two decades, primarily in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Over the years, it has funded a range of programmes in areas such as nutrition, healthcare, agriculture, water and sanitation, gender equality and financial inclusion. In agriculture alone, it has spent about $6bn on development initiatives. Despite this substantial investment, the foundation’s efforts have been the subject of widespread criticism both in Africa and internationally.
In particular, serious concerns have been raised about the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of the foundation’s agricultural interventions – especially the Green Revolution model it has promoted through AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Co-founded in 2006 by the Rockefeller and Gates foundations, AGRA aimed to improve food security and reduce poverty for 30 million smallholder households in 11 sub-Saharan African countries by 2021. Nineteen years on, the agricultural transformation Gates envisioned – driven by American capital and know-how – has failed to materialise.
Experts argue that the Green Revolution model has not only fallen short on alleviating hunger and poverty but may in fact also be exacerbating both. Problems commonly cited include rising farmer debt, increased pesticide use, environmental degradation, declining crop diversity and a growing corporate stranglehold over Africa’s food systems.
The limitations of Gates’s agricultural ambitions are, arguably, unsurprising. The model is rooted in the American Green Revolution of the 1940s and 1950s – a technological shift linked to settler-colonial agricultural systems and racialised power structures. Gates’s philanthropic ideology, shaped by this legacy, risks reproducing systems of dependency and ownership in the Global South.
At the core of the Green Revolution, past and present, is a belief in the supremacy of Western science and innovation. This worldview justifies the transfer of proprietary technologies to developing countries while simultaneously devaluing local knowledge systems and Indigenous expertise.
Despite its rhetorical commitment to equity, the Gates Foundation often prioritises and financially benefits researchers, pharmaceutical firms and agritech corporations in the West far more than the smallholder farmers and local specialists it claims to serve. Kenyan agroecologist Celestine Otieno has described this model as “food slavery” and a “second phase of colonisation”.
Meanwhile, the foundation’s global health programmes have also drawn criticism for promoting technical, apolitical solutions that ignore the deeply rooted historical and political determinants of health inequity. Just as troubling is the fact that many of these interventions are implemented in poor communities with minimal transparency or local accountability.
As Gwilym David Blunt, a political philosopher and lecturer in international politics, notes, transnational philanthropy – exemplified by the Gates Foundation – grants the ultra-wealthy disproportionate power over public priorities. This undermines the principle of autonomy that undergirds any vision of distributive global justice, including the right of Africans to shape their own futures.
All of the African countries working with the Gates Foundation continue to face the enduring problems associated with foreign-designed economic interventions and chronic dependence on aid. South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria, for instance, are all contending with the fallout from United States President Donald Trump’s cuts to the US Agency for International Development.
Still, Gates’s philanthropy is only one piece of a much larger, more entrenched problem.
No amount of aid can compensate for the absence of visionary, ethical and accountable leadership – or the political instability that plagues parts of the continent. In this vacuum, figures like Gates step in. But these interventions can be politically expedient and risk concealing deeper systemic dysfunction.
On June 1, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed awarded Gates the Grand Order of Merit of Ethiopia in recognition of the foundation’s 25 years of contributions to the country. Yet even Gates would likely acknowledge that Ethiopia remains mired in corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and persistent mismanagement of public funds.
Abiy’s nationalist rhetoric and disastrous internal policies helped trigger a 2020–2022 civil war, which claimed the lives of up to 600,000 people. Although the conflict formally ended in November 2022, Amnesty International has reported that millions still await justice. Human rights violations remain widespread with little accountability for atrocities committed in Tigray and Oromia.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Abiy continues to deny any wrongdoing by his military, insisting in parliament that his forces have not committed war crimes. Such claims only underscore the deep crisis of leadership Ethiopia faces.
What Ethiopia – and many other African states – urgently need is not another influx of Western money but a radical overhaul of governance. Indeed, Gates’s contributions may paradoxically help prop up the very systems of impunity and dysfunction that block meaningful progress.
This is why Machel’s response to Gates’s announcement was so disappointing. Rather than celebrating the promise of more Western aid, she could have used the moment to speak frankly about Africa’s deeper crisis: corrupt, extractive and unaccountable leadership. Her suggestion that Africans should rely indefinitely on foreign benevolence is not only misguided – it also reinforces the very power dynamics that philanthropy claims to disrupt.
Yes, Gates’s decision to donate most of his fortune to Africa is, of course, admirable. But as an outsider immersed in the logic of “white saviourism” and “philanthrocapitalism”, he cannot fix a continent’s self-inflicted wounds. No foreign billionaire can. Only Africans – through transparent, courageous and locally driven leadership – can.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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