Bill Gates, chairman of the Gates Foundation, has raised concerns over the low healthcare spending by the Nigerian government, warning that current funding levels are inadequate to tackle maternal and child mortality and other pressing health challenges.
Speaking during a media roundtable on Wednesday, Gates disclosed that he had already spoken to President Bola Tinubu about the urgent need to increase the country’s health budget, noting that significant improvement in health outcomes would be impossible without greater investment.
Okay.ng reports that Gates did not mince words in his assessment.
“Well, the amount of money Nigeria spends on health care is very, very small. I don’t know why you would have expected that number (maternal mortality) to go down,” he said.
Gates noted that many deaths among mothers and newborns occur because women are forced to deliver at home, often without the medical support necessary to handle complications such as cesarean sections.
“What countries like India do is they drive delivery into centres where they can give C-sections. But that takes money,” he added.
In February 2025, the National Assembly increased Nigeria’s health budget by N300 billion, bringing the total sectoral allocation to N2.48 trillion, or 5.18 percent of the national budget. Despite this increment, the percentage still falls far short of the 15 percent benchmark agreed upon in the Abuja Declaration of 2001.
When asked whether the Gates Foundation could fill the funding gap left by waning U.S. government contributions to global health, Gates offered a sobering perspective.
“There’s nobody who can match that US government money. And the European money is all coming down. We have like a 40% decrease from Germany and the UK,” he said.
He explained that while the Gates Foundation continues to increase its own spending annually, its resources are finite.
“We don’t have some special bucket of money… If they [governments] increase, I’ll still spend my money. If they disappear, I’ll still spend my money. So my money is not extra money,” he emphasized.
Gates revealed that his foundation occasionally steps in to cover emergencies — such as unfinished medical trials or stranded medicines — but cannot replace the scale of government contributions.
“I’m very upset about it. We’ll have more HIV deaths, malaria deaths, and maternal deaths. There’s just no denying that that money was being well spent. And there’s no alternate source that matches up to what was available,” he concluded.
