Foreign aid cuts could kill millions, says Bill Gates

Millions more people could die if major world economies cut their foreign aid investment, Bill Gates has warned in a new report measuring global development targets.

In the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s first annual analysis of the world’s progress towards achieving each of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the software billionaire said that “remarkable progress has been made” in reducing extreme poverty and disease, but warned that political uncertainty over funding and research has put future gains in jeopardy.

Described by the UN as “17 goals to transform our world”, the broad targets cover aims including the provision of universal clean water, economic growth and gender equality, in an effort to dramatically improve the standing of poorer countries by 2030.

But research commissioned by the Foundation showed that progress towards certain SDGs could start reversing if richer countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom slash their foreign aid budgets.

The report highlights the case of HIV transmission, which saw a dramatic decrease after 2005 as a funding drive from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) began to take effect.

But after President Donald Trump’s administration proposed swingeing cuts of up to 31% of America’s 2018 foreign aid budget earlier this year, the Foundation calculated that a 10% drop in global funding could amount to an extra 5.6 million HIV deaths per year over current projections.

Mr Gates said: “Governments in both donor and developing countries that responded so aggressively to the crisis 15 years ago are now focusing on other things. Funding for HIV control has been flat, and now there’s talk of cuts.

“In a world of competing priorities and limited resources, these conversations are mandatory, but I want to be sure people having them are clear about the consequences.”

In a stark warning against a 10% decrease, he added: “Given the tenor of the global discussion, an even bigger cut to global HIV funding is a very real possibility.”

Despite huge decreases in the number of children dying before the age of five since 1990, the report also shows that an extra 800,000 children could die each year above current projections if funding for basic vaccines and healthcare are taken away from the poorest communities.

In April, Theresa May re-committed the UK to spending 0.7% of its gross national income on foreign aid, in-line with a 2015 parliamentary bill that committed it to British law for the first time.

However, asked if he was concerned about the long-term impact of political turmoil created by events such as Brexit, Mr Gates said he hoped that scientific research between the UK and other EU member states would not be impeded by the fallout.

He said: “The research budget at the European community level – the UK was a net beneficiary of that. And we have a lot of grantees in the UK, because there’s great science that goes on there.

“We hope that that’s not slowed down in any way by the difficulty of people moving around or how the various science funding things work. But there’s a lot that’s not known about how that will be managed going forward.”

Before Britain voted to leave the EU in June 2016, The Microsoft founder penned a letter to The Times in which he said a decision to leave would make Britain a “significantly less attractive place to do business and to invest.”