Global Development Overview

Nearly 2.5 billion people in the developing world live on less than $2 a day. This kind of grinding poverty—incomprehensible to most people in developed countries—often reduces life to a daily struggle for survival. The basics of food, water, and shelter are in chronic short supply, and health care and education can be unattainable luxuries.

Life in rural areas, where two-thirds of the poorest live, can be particularly punishing. Many rural families farm small plots of land and depend on often meager harvests for food and income. These rural people are disproportionately burdened by malnutrition and illness, and they have limited access to hospitals, schools, sanitation systems, and clean water.

Opportunities to escape this kind of poverty are elusive. The world’s poorest people lack access to banking services—from loans to savings accounts to insurance—that would help them manage life’s risks and take advantage of life’s opportunities. And while economic and social progress is increasingly driven by information technology, only one in six people around the world has access to a computer with Internet access.

In 2006, we established the Global Development Program to increase opportunities for people in the developing world to lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. In establishing the program, we sought to identify core initiatives that would build on and complement our existing expertise in global health.

Our grantmaking in the program’s first year focused on an ambitious partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation to help African farmers increase their productivity and on a series of innovative efforts to bring financial services to poor people in Africa and Asia who haven’t had access to them before.