Gates Foundation Adds $80-Million to India AIDS Program
July 24, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
Bill Gates, in India to receive a humanitarian award, pledged another $80-million to Avahan, the HIV-prevention program his foundation started in the country in 2003, The Seattle Times reports.
On Saturday Mr. Gates will be presented the Indira Gandhi Prize on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which had already committed $258-million to the program supporting more than 100 local nonprofit groups in six Indian states. He is slated to meet today with the country’s top health official to discuss plans to shift key aspects of Avahan’s work to state control.
Earlier this week, Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, responded in a letter to Forbes to a highly critical assessment of Avahan published by the magazine.
In The Wall Street Journal, New Delhi bureau chief Paul Beckett used the occasion of Gates’s award to discuss what he terms the “lack of dramatic, sustained, well-organized individual giving” among India’s wealthy business elite.
