Bill Gates says: For first time in 25 years, number of child deaths are set to rise; but to be clear, it’s not just the US that’s made cuts; it is that …

Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ philanthropic organisation, the Gates Foundation, has issued a grim warning about global child mortality rates. According to the Gates Foundation, for the first time in 25 years, the number of child deaths is projected to rise, with an estimated 200,000 additional deaths.

Bill Gates noted that this reversal follows massive cuts to foreign aid made by the Trump administration and other wealthy countries. However, Gates clarified that the funding reductions are not isolated to one country. In an interview with The Conversation, Gates said: "But to be clear, it’s not just the US that’s made cuts. The UK made cuts, Germany made cuts, and it’s that overall effect that’s going to make this a tough five-year time period." “In parts of the world like northern Nigeria, over 10% of the kids die before they reach the age of five. In the U.S., that number would be well below 1%, and that would mostly be difficulties at the time of birth. Malaria’s been a tough one. The U.S. abruptly fired a lot of people and cut off a lot of money in the first half of the year. So that’s where the bed nets were being handed out, the food was being handed out, TB cases were being detected,” Gates added.

“There were sudden and massive cuts — you just can’t deny that’s led to lots of deaths,” he said, noting that the global health movement had celebrated a halving of child deaths from 10 million annually between 2000 and 2025 due to increased resources like vaccines.

Why Bill Gates thinks next six months is crucial

When asked about whether he has made progress on the funding front and helping US and other governments to understand the impact that they could have, Gates said: “I think the next six months will be very important. It’ll be determined what the Congress’ role is in setting the budgets for global health. It’ll be determined what these new compacts look like. For the poor countries, do they maintain a level of generosity that can get us back on track? Certainly the U.S. commitment to the global fund was a positive data point. They maintained the huge generosity that they’ve had there, which is very helpful to me as I go to the European countries and say, “Okay, this is a one-for-two match construct. So please don’t cut this.” That helped me get the cuts in those European numbers to be way less than they would have been.”Explaining why a lot of countries follow what the US does on multiple ways, Gates highlighted: “They have aging societies. They of course have pressure to increase their defense budgets. All rich countries have very tight budgets. So that’s why I always make it clear this is less than 1 percent of the budget. When you ask somebody in general, they’ll think it’s quite high, like 5, 10 percent. And no, in the U.S. case, it’s never, never reached 1 percent. The big increase in the U.S. that got us up to almost 1 percent was under President Bush, where he saw that people dying of HIV in Africa — That really wasn’t the golden rule to let those people die when the medicines could be so very, very inexpensive. Now we have a chance because of the innovation pipeline, to do things that can even more effectively cut deaths.”