Bill Gates' Foundation Donates £25 million To Irish Charity

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged a grant of $41 million to an Ireland-based charity organisation to back child health programmes and put a check on soaring infant and mother death rates across six developing countries.

The Irish charity organisation, Concern International, will be receiving the grant over the next five years, and it will support initiatives on development and testing new ways to provide maternal, infant and child health solutions in countries across South Asia and Africa.

The initiative will kick off in India, Malawi, and Sierra Leone, which confront major barriers to make the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for health of mothers and child become true.

Describing this huge grant as a ground-breaking plan that would help saving lives across the selected regions, Tom Arnold, chief exec for Concern International, said in a statement, “Half a million women die every year in childbirth, the majority in developing countries. The whole point of this is to look for breakthroughs”.

He further asserted that the charity organisation had been working on the project for a year or so, and that it was competing against 14 other such groups for achieving the grant from the foundation.

The initiative will figure out, field test, as well as assess at least 27 innovative ideas which show the potential for increasing the effectiveness of the move, along with required characteristics most favourable to scaling-up.