Bill Gates warns Ukraine war is sapping Europe’s foreign aid budgets
Russia’s war in Ukraine is straining Europe’s commitment to international aid and climate action, Bill Gates has said, as he warned that the world is on track to miss almost all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals its leaders committed to hit by 2030.
“This is the toughest set of challenges global development has faced,” the co-chair of the world’s largest private philanthropic organisation told the Financial Times, adding that he hoped that UK prime minister Liz Truss’s new government would not make further cuts to the overseas aid budget.
Collectively, EU countries contribute almost half of all official development assistance. Gates acknowledged that the costs of donor countries’ coronavirus pandemic response had made navigating the internal politics of international aid harder. But “the Ukraine war, I’d say, is even worse” because of Europe’s outsized spending in areas from food security to gender equality, he said.
What Gates called the “quite alarming” statistics come after he put another $20bn of the fortune he made at Microsoft into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to try to accelerate progress against preventable disease, inequality and poverty.
The data echo an estimate last week that the funding shortfall for meeting the UN’s goals rose by a third to as much as $135tn over the past year. “Progress on several SDGs has been undone,” said the report from Force for Good, an initiative backed by companies including BlackRock, HSBC, Nomura and UBS.
The Gates Foundation’s co-chairs tempered their warnings with hope that innovation and investment in areas such as drought-resistant seeds and digital financial inclusion could yield progress towards the goals.
“Failure is not inevitable,” Gates told the FT. “I remain optimistic.”
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
