Bill Gates believes that aid to Ukraine disrupts the achievement of the UN’s sustainable development goals
Bill Gates said in an FT commentary that the war in Ukraine is straining Europe’s commitments on international aid and climate action, and the world is on track to miss almost all of the sustainable development goals that UN leaders have pledged to achieve by 2030.
According to Gates, this is “the most difficult set of challenges” for global development. He noted that this was influenced, in particular, by the spending of donor countries on the response to the coronavirus pandemic, but “the war in Ukraine, I would say, is even worse.”
“The war in Ukraine is stretching their budgets with spending on defense, refugees, subsidies for electricity and logistics,” Gates noted.
- In 2020, the UK, which is the largest donor to the Gavi vaccine alliance, cut overseas aid spending from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5% due to the Covid-19 crisis. Rishi Sunak, then chancellor, said last year that the controversial cut would be reversed in 2024-25.
- As the replenishment deadlines for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative approach, “our goal (…) is to emphasize that these budgets should not be cut if at all possible,” Gates said.
- In 2015, nearly 200 countries joined the UN’s challenges to address challenges from hunger to climate change. In their annual progress report released Tuesday, Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates wrote: “Seven years on, the world is on track to meet almost none of the goals.”
- They added that under current circumstances, “we will need to accelerate our progress five times faster to achieve most of our goals.” Even that may be an underestimate, the report says, “as some projections do not yet take into account the impact of the pandemic, let alone the war in Ukraine or the food crisis it has caused in Africa.”
- In particular, “the conflict in Ukraine has ‘sharply exacerbated’ the problems of food security,” writes the FT with reference to Mark Suzman, executive director of the Gates Foundation. Global gender equality is expected no earlier than 2108, that is, three generations later than previously estimated, said French Gates.
- The funding shortfall to meet the UN’s goals has grown by a third to $135 trillion over the past year.
Why is this important?
Bill Gates is a well-known philanthropist and the head of several charitable foundations, which receive large funds from him to fight serious diseases, hunger and inequality, climate threats, etc. These problems are global and undeniably important, as is the funding of initiatives working to overcome them. Eradicating them is difficult, it is a long strategic process.
But there are fires that break out in an instant, spread very quickly, claiming hundreds of thousands and millions of lives in a short period of time. If they are not extinguished quickly, their consequences can surpass most of the problems listed above. It is difficult to count how many people have died and continue to suffer because of gender inequality. But what would have been the consequences of the Second World War if the Allies had decided that it was too expensive to allocate funds to fight the Nazis, and it was better to spend the money on something “more global”?
The narrative that sounds in the material can be harmful and dangerous. The authors of the FT do not in any way mention the party that actually started the war – that is, Russia. Instead, they use the wording Ukraine war, which can give the reader the impression that the main problem of this war lies precisely in Ukraine. And it was Ukraine that caused the famine in Africa, not Russia, which burned the crops and blocked the ports. And the war itself is called a “conflict” by journalists.
Bill Gates is definitely right – cutting budgets for vaccination and achieving other strategic goals is not worth it. But the costs of aid to Ukraine are also important, if only because if this fire is not extinguished now, the consequences can be much more exhausting both for the UN and for the whole world. World leaders realized this one day in the case of covid. Let’s hope they understand this now.
