Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,

Philanthropic organization that became the largest endowed foundation in the world with assets of about $21 billion when it was founded in January 2000.

William Henry Gates III, known as Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, created the foundation out of two earlier philanthropic efforts. Using the vast wealth he earned from the Microsoft Corporation, the computer software company he cofounded in 1975, Bill Gates began his organized philanthropic interests in 1994 with the William H. Gates Foundation.


This foundation was focused on global health issues. Three years later, Gates founded the Gates Library Foundation, which was renamed the Gates Learning Foundation in 1999. The same year the William H. Gates Foundation was renamed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sharing a concern for public library access like that of philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the Gates Learning Foundation created partnerships with public libraries to expand access to computer technologies.


In January 2000 the Learning Foundation combined with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates’s father, attorney William H. Gates, Sr., runs the foundation, which is based in Seattle, Washington.

A major goal of the foundation is to bring medical advances and information technology to people living in poverty. Global health initiative grants help bring vaccines to the developing world and support ways to stop the transmission of diseases such as AIDS and tuberculosis. Global health grants also target reproductive health and infant mortality issues in developing countries.

The foundation’s education programs, which were launched in early 2000, committed $350 million to three areas: development of model schools and school districts, professional development for educators, and higher education scholarships, especially for talented low-income students.


The foundation’s education efforts address inequities in underserved school districts, particularly those in black and Hispanic communities. The foundation promotes the idea of creating high schools with small student bodies and personalized learning as an important education reform.


The foundation also seeks to bring Internet access to all public libraries serving low-income communities in the United States and Canada. As of November 2002, that goal had been largely realized with more than 95 percent of public libraries in the United States offering free Internet access.