Global leaders pledged US$ 1.9 billion to advance polio eradication on Monday, including a new $1.2 billion commitment by the Gates Foundation.

The pledges, made on the margins of Abu Dhabi  Finance Week, reduce the remaining budget gap for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s (GPEI) to just $440 million through 2029.  That’s in comparison by the $2.3 billion funding gap that had been faced in May, at the time of the World Health Assembly, following the withdrawal of the United States from WHO, a major GPEI partner in early 2025.  See related story:

Polio Eradication Imperiled by $2.3 Billion Funding Gap

“The funds will accelerate vital efforts to reach 370 million children each year with polio vaccines, alongside strengthening health systems in affected countries to protect children from other preventable diseases,” said GPEI in a press release Monday.

Along with the Gates pledge, some $450 million was pledged by Rotary International, another leading GPEI partner along with WHO; $154 million from Pakistan; $140 million from the United Arab Emirates’s Mohamed bin Zayed Foundation; $100 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies; $62 million from Germany; and $46 million from the United States. Smaller amounts were pledged by Japan, Luxembourg and other foundations.

The pledge by the US, traditionaly GPEI’s second largest donor, was only a fraction of past years contributions. In 2023 alone, for instance, the US contributed some  $230 million – funneling roughly half of the funds directly to GPEI as well as through WHO.

In October 2024, the Polio Oversight Board approved an expanded multi-year budget totalling US$ 6.9 billion for 2022-2029.  That represented a substantial increase in the $4.8 billion projected for 2022-2026.  It simultaneously extended timeline for wild poliovirus eradication to 2027, and for the Type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus variant to the end of 2029.

The wildvirus saw a sharp resurgence in conflict-ridden Afghanistan  and Pakistan in 2024. Vaccine-derived poliovirus variants, meanwhile, emerged or re-emerged in 35 countries across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and even Spain – also as a result of conflict, migration and under-vaccination.

The 2026 GPEI budget is now pegged at some $786.5 million. The multi-year budget will be revised in review of progress in 2026, GPEI said.

The new Gates Foundation pledge was not unexpected following the announcement by the tech leader and philanthropist Bill Gates earlier this year that he intended to give away all of his fortune and drain his foundation’s endowment, estimated at around $200 billion, within the next 20 years.

Speaking to the UAE newspaper The National during the Abu Dhabi conference, Gates said the Foundation “has a 20-year lifetime and we have very ambitious goals. First to get polio done, but then malaria’s another disease that should be eradicated”. He added: “It’d be wonderful if 30 years from now, people said ‘malaria? What was that? Polio? What was that?”

Image Credits: Global Polio Eradication Initiative , Global Polio Eradication Initiative.