Melinda French Gates has committed another $50 million to women’s health and reproductive rights organizations, pushing her total giving in this area past $600 million since departing the Gates Foundation in 2024. The announcement comes with an explicit appeal to other major philanthropists to increase their own commitments, framing the scale of the problem as one no single funder can address alone.
The new funding is divided between two recipients. The Menopause Society, a nonprofit serving health-care professionals, will receive $10 million to expand training for frontline providers nationwide. The larger portion, $40 million, goes to Co-Impact, a global grant-making organization that will use the funds to integrate mental health services into maternal and primary care in Africa and other regions. Co-Impact primarily channels resources to locally led and women-led organizations, and counts MacKenzie Scott among its other prominent backers.
Women’s health carries a funding gap that the numbers make difficult to minimize. More than 19 million women in the United States lack access to contraception within their communities, a woman dies from childbirth-related causes every two minutes worldwide, and less than one percent of aging research addresses menopause, figures that underpin French Gates’s argument that the field has been systematically deprioritized across medicine, research, and philanthropy alike.
Her giving now covers midlife conditions and menopause alongside reproductive and maternal health, with additional grants expected later this year. Her public call to other major donors arrives as nearly 70 percent of nonprofits report being affected by funding cuts, and the organizations working in women’s health are among those absorbing that pressure. French Gates has pledged to direct more than $2 billion toward women and girls in the coming years, a commitment that positions her as the most prominent independent force in this funding area globally.
