Melinda French Gates will give $250M to women's health groups globally

abcnews.go.com:

Melinda French Gates will grant $250 million to support women’s health around the world through an open call for nonprofits to apply for funding

Melinda French Gates will grant $250 million to support women's health around the world through an open call for nonprofits to apply for funding.

The pledge announced Wednesday signals a new chapter in her individual philanthropic giving since departing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year and is part of a two-year, $1 billion commitment that French Gates made in May to support women and families around the world.

Haven Ley, chief strategy officer at French Gates' organization Pivotal Ventures, said the grant competition was a “curtain raiser” to a likely new focus on funding women’s health globally. Previously, Pivotal had primarily funded organizations working to advance women's power in the U.S.

“By focusing on women’s health, she’s expanded her definition of women’s power to include a precondition that women must have their health to be powerful," Ley said, speaking of French Gates, who also has 20 years of experience funding global health through the Gates Foundation.

Lever for Change, a nonprofit affiliate of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is running the grant competition, called Action for Women’s Health. It has previously worked with both French Gates and billionaire author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to award $40 million in 2019 to support nonprofits building women's power in the U.S. Scott then also gave away $640 million to community-based nonprofits in March through a similar open call.

This new open call will give at least 100 nonprofit organizations around the world between $1 million and $5 million in