Gates Foundation commits $1 billion to bring AI tools to health workers, farmers and teachers in poorest regions

The Gates Foundation has committed $1 billion over the next two years to bring AI tools to health workers, farmers and teachers in the world's poorest regions, including parts of Africa, with 40% of that funding, roughly $400 million, going to health care.

The pledge was announced Monday alongside the foundation's tenth annual Goalkeepers Report, Connecting Africa reported on September 15, 2026-which the foundation says lays out the steps needed to stop AI from widening the gap between rich and poor countries.

Part of the health funding builds on a $50 million partnership between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI, announced in January 2026, that is already placing AI tools inside health clinics in Rwanda to help frontline workers with patient care.

The foundation says the aim is to bring similar AI support to primary health care at 1,000 health centers across Africa by 2028.

Because many of the communities the foundation is targeting rely on basic phones rather than smartphones, much of the work also involves building AI systems that understand spoken local languages rather than typed text, in accents the technology does not yet recognize well.