IslamicFinance.de

According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an additional $3.27 billion in support is needed to make polio eradication a reality. Jay Wenger, Director of the Polio Eradication Programme at the Gates Foundation, said that it is vital that the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, GPEI, receives renewed political and financial support. The biennial Reaching the Last Mile Forum convenes global health leaders to share insights on how to eradicate infectious diseases. Held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, this year's forum in Abu Dhabi is themed 'Accelerating the Pace' and hopes to ensure full financing to finish the job. Wenger said the Gates Foundation is proud to partner with the UAE across a number of initiatives to eliminate diseases.

More than US$718 million will be invested in roads, power generation, water supply, sanitation, agriculture and rural development projects in a number of countries after the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) approved a funding partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The projects will be in Turkey, the Sultanate of Brunei, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Cote d'Ivoire and Benin. Technical assistance will also be given to projects in Bahrain. The first tranche of funds under the agreement will see $100m worth of grants issued before the end of this year. Operations are expected to begin in 2016.

Judith Rodin is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. She is in charge of giving away one of America’s historic fortunes. But nowadays Rockefeller doesn’t mean quite what it once did. The foundation ranks only 16th in assets among U.S. charities. After a century of giving away money, only 4.1 billion US-Dollars are left of the once enormous fortune. No. 1 in the ranking for charity is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with 37.2 Billion US-Dollars. The latest pilot project is Smart Power that aims to electrify villages in India.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) reportedly has partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to form a new initiative called “Geospatial Mapping of Financial Institutions” that aims to increase the financial inclusion of low-income Nigerians. The new service will map all financial access points in Nigeria, including every microfinance institution and off-site ATMs, that Nigerians will be able to see online or on their mobile phones. The program reportedly will also enable the government and banks to determine whether certain regions of the country lack access to an appropriate number of financial services. BMGF will provide a monetary grant of an unspecified amount in order to pursue this goal. This new project is part of CBN’s initiative, the Nigeria Financial Inclusion Strategy (NFIS). The amount of monetary support that CBN has contributed to NFIS is unavailable.