The Gates Foundation, founded by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, and Wellcome Leap, a US nonprofit set up in 2020 by the UK health research charity Wellcome Trust, have committed $100 million to a programme that aims to cut stillbirths in half in selected countries within ten years, beginning in sub-Saharan Africa.
The two organisations announced the programme, called Uzima, on the evening of Monday 12 October 2026 at the World Health Summit in Berlin, Germany, the yearly gathering of health leaders, according to the summit's own press release.
Uzima is the Swahili word for life and well-being.
The organisations say nearly 2 million babies are stillborn worldwide each year, almost half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, which works out to one baby every 17 seconds.
A stillbirth is a baby born with no signs of life late in pregnancy, which the UN counts from 28 weeks.
The UN body that counts child deaths, the Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, put the number at 1.9 million for 2023 in a report published in March 2025.
It estimated that nearly 900,000 of those babies, almost half, died during labour.
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, summarising that report in 2025, said most of those deaths can be prevented with timely, quality care.
Progress in Africa has been slow.
A World Bank summary of the UN group's 2020 estimates said sub-Saharan Africa cut its stillbirth rate by 23% between 2000 and 2019.
That was the smallest fall among regions that started with rates above 12 per 1,000 births.
Each organisation is putting in $50 million over the first three years.
The organisations say the money is to identify and validate promising ideas, and they have not published how it is split between the five areas below.
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Some of the ideas are tests and scans, including eye-examination devices, meant to spot problems such as pre-eclampsia (dangerously high blood pressure in pregnancy) and diabetes that starts in pregnancy, so that women can be referred for care in time.
Others use artificial intelligence to read ultrasound scans, which could make risk checks easier to reach in places with limited resources.
Sensors used during labour could help health workers notice complications sooner, and decision-support tools could help them read warning signs and act in time.
Alongside all of this, the programme plans support and tracking systems that give mothers, families and community health workers useful information and let them follow progress.
The programme will build on technology from Wellcome Leap's earlier In Utero programme and on maternal and newborn health work already backed by the Gates Foundation.
The programme expects to announce its first participating country in the coming months and to choose an initial package of tools by early 2027.
After the first three years, it says it will work with participating countries to expand whatever proves most effective.
The organisations say that stage will need more money and more partners.
They have called on investors, charities and governments to join, and have invited health ministers to help shape the programme.
The stated aim is to show that stillbirth rates can be halved over a decade in selected countries. It is not a promise of a fall across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
Regina Dugan, chief executive of Wellcome Leap, said in the joint statement issued in Berlin on 12 October: "Stillbirth is not an inevitable tragedy."
The claim that these tools can cut stillbirths comes from the organisations behind the programme.
The announcement does not present results from Uzima in any country, no country has been named, and the statements give no estimate of how many stillbirths could be prevented.
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