Thursday, June 5, 2025 - Bill Gates, chairman of the Gates Foundation, has criticised Nigeria’s level of public health investment, describing it as insufficient to address the country’s longstanding healthcare challenges.
Speaking during a media roundtable on Wednesday, June 4,
Gates said the low budgetary allocation to health is a major factor behind the
country’s high rates of maternal and child mortality. He revealed that he had
raised the issue directly with President Bola Tinubu, urging the Nigerian
government to increase its health spending.
“Well, the amount of money Nigeria spends on health care is
very, very small,” Gates said. “I don’t know why you would have expected that
number (referring to maternal mortality) to go down. If a mother delivers at
home, there are certain complications that you can’t solve. So what countries
like India do is they drive delivery into centres where they can give
C-sections. But that takes money.”
Although the Nigerian national assembly added N300 billion
to the 2025 health budget in February, raising the total allocation to N2.48
trillion, or 5.18 percent of the national budget, Gates said more investment is
necessary if meaningful change is to be achieved.
Gates also addressed concerns about diminishing global
health funding, particularly from the United States, which has historically
been a leading contributor. When asked whether the Gates Foundation would fill
the gap left by U.S. cuts, he said no private organisation could replace the
scale of funding previously provided by the U.S. government.
“The problem with the Gates Foundation is we don’t have some
special bucket of money,” he said. “We spend more every year, and all my money
will be spent. And so no matter what the other people do, it’s the same amount
of money.”
Gates noted that in some cases, the foundation steps in to
help when essential medicines are left unused or trials are abandoned. However,
he emphasized that the foundation’s funding is not a replacement for
international public sector contributions.
“There’s nobody who can match that US government money. And
the European money is all coming down. We have like a 40% decrease from Germany
and the UK,” he added, attributing the European funding cuts to economic
pressures, such as war spending and ageing populations.
“I’m very upset about it. We’ll have more HIV deaths,
malaria deaths, and maternal deaths. There’s just no denying that that money
was being well spent. And there’s no alternate source that matches up to what
was available,” he said.
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