By Maxwell Awumah
Ho, Sept. 21, GNA – The Gates Foundation on Monday announced plans to spend at least US$1 billion over the next two years, to expand access to artificial intelligence and the AI-enabled solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that have been out of reach for many around the world.
The announcement comes as the Foundation launched its 10th annual Goalkeepers Report, which focused on the urgent actions needed to ensure that AI helped narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.
The 2026 report, ‘Make This Matter: AI, Equity, and the Choice We Can’t Delay,’ argued that AI’s trajectory was not fixed with the window to influence who benefited and how soon.
The report, available to the Ghana News Agency, included examples of foundation-supported partners that were already changing lives using AI in clinics, classrooms and on small farms.
The Report said AI could be a great equalizer, but only if it was built intentionally to benefit the people who needed it most.
Mr Bill Gates, the Chairman, in the report said the Gates Foundation was created partly to address a basic market failure which involved the fact that the people with the greatest needs often had the least power to shape the direction of innovation and investment.
He said “Much of our work has been about closing that gap. AI presents the same challenge, only at a much greater speed.
Left to the market alone, the most capable tools would be built first for the people and institutions which are most able to pay for them, and not necessarily for those who can benefit most.”
The Goalkeepers Report identified three areas where action now could help AI improve lives and livelihoods for more people in the years ahead: Firstly, to make AI tools work in every language that people spoke.
It noted that more than 90 per cent of the data used to train early large language models came from English-language sources, leaving many communities that could benefit from AI poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.
Secondly, it sought to build AI tools for the contexts in which people would use them. Effective tools required data and expertise from the places and populations they were intended to serve, with countries and communities deciding how data was managed and protected.
Thirdly, invest in people and access, so communities could shape how AI worked for them, saying doctors, farmers, teachers, and developers needed opportunities to learn how to evaluate AI tools and adapt what worked with their own contexts.
They also needed affordable access to the technology which would require action from technology companies, as well as investment from governments and philanthropy.
The report noted that equitable access to the benefits of AI would not happen on its own but only if AI tools were built with the expertise of the end users, they could put knowledge and advice in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, who had not benefited from previous technology revolutions.
The Gates Foundation’s funding would support partners that were already working to close the gaps in access to AI and to ensure that AI tools reflected the knowledge and priorities of the people who need them most.
The report said the commitment would help scale up the work of those partners over the next two years, with the funding distributed roughly as follows across the foundation’s priority areas: including 40 per cent to support to education, focusing on areas like AI tutoring, to help individualise student learning and teaching tools for use in U.S. classrooms and abroad.
It said 40 per cent of the funding would go into supporting health care, from diagnostics and clinical decision-making support for frontline health workers, to maternal and newborn care tools and the discovery of new drugs as well as vaccines.
Again, 10 per cent would be earmarked for agriculture, including helping smallholder farmers to acquire AI-generated advice customised to their soil, weather, and crop conditions.
Additionally, 10 per cent would also go into building the digital foundation that equitable AI depended on, including data sets in languages that the tools did not yet understand.
The Foundation is also calling on others who share the goal of making AI more useful, accessible, and affordable to invest their resources and expertise and use their voices.
The Foundation said, “We can harness AI for good, but it won’t happen by accident,” stressing that it would require a deliberate, specific commitment from government leaders and the companies developing the technology to measure success, not only by what AI could do for the most profitable users, but by what it could do for the people who would benefit most.
GNA
Edited by Christabel Addo
Reporter Maxwell Awumah
Email: [email protected]