Agence Française de Développement and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation : A collaboration to advance gender equity and improve development outcomes

Our foundation has collaborated with AFD on health and development projects since 2011. This led to a memorandum of understanding in 2016, to work together on a range of issues and across a number of regions, including collaborating on Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and Water and Sanitation in West Africa.

Building on this shared experience, and recognizing our complementary strengths, on 19 January 2023, AFD and the foundation signed a letter in January 2023 outlining a more systematic partnership to increase the reach and impact of both organizations by co-financing specific initiatives.

Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are deeply interconnected. Partnerships have the potential to significantly advance progress toward multiple SDGs by directing combined expertise, experience, and funding toward issues including health, gender equality, economic development, climate resilience, access to water and beyond.

Our collaboration with AFD involves a jointly funding mechanism that invests in projects that align with country priorities, maximizes impact, and helps build capacity among our partners while generating measurable, sustainable results. By mobilizing a wide range of financial instruments and modalities, our multi-year partnership framework seeks to identify shared priorities and co-programming opportunities, and allow for scaled-up, jointly funded and jointly implemented strategies.

Key areas of action

The partnership is initially focusing on the following areas of intervention: gender-related issues, sexual and reproductive health and rights (including family planning), maternal and child health, nutrition, social protection, water and sanitation, and human development (including climate resilience) in alignment with relevant national country strategies.

Our joint investments will aim to:

• Support health system strengthening, with a focus on women and youth
• Reimagine and strengthen gender-intentional reproductive, maternal and child health, and nutrition services through existing social protection programs
• Support countries in implementing and expanding gender-intentional projects that integrate post-partum family planning; reproductive, maternal, and child health; and nutrition, in alignment with national action plans for integrated services
• Develop health and social protection interventions as part of a climate adaptation agenda
• Promote young women’s leadership development
• Develop gender-sensitive water and sanitation initiatives

The scope of the collaboration will expand to include other related areas, which may include:

• Digital inclusion, including digital banking, digital public goods, and digital health tools
• Sanitation solutions, including citywide inclusive sanitation approaches
• Climate adaptation

Priority regions

Our initial focus regions include:

• Francophone / West Africa e.g., including Benin, Burkina Faso, Côote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo,
• East Africa: e.g., including Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Uganda, Madagascar,
• Central Africa: e.g., including the Democratic Republic of the Congo DRC,
• South Asia: e.g., including Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Pakistan Afghanistan.

“Accelerating collective action is necessary to remain on track toward achieving the SDGs”, said Mark Suzman. “This new partnership builds on a firm and long-lasting relationship with the Agence Française de Développement. Together, we can drive new ways to scale activities and maximize local impact, ensuring sustainable solutions in the fields of health, gender, and beyond reach as many people as possible, as soon as possible.”

 "I am pleased to see how our partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has deepened over the past 6 years”, commented Remy Rioux, “and that now, in the context of exacerbated crises, we are ready to scale up our common activities, through joint programming and a wide range of financial instruments, with an initial focus on gender equality and health systems in Africa and South Asia. The upcoming years will be crucial to boost SDG investment and develop impactful projects, and we are both determined to do so, together".

Contact presse :

• AFD : Juliette Courot - +33 7 50 18 72 51