WIRED: Gates Foundation Goalkeepers V3

The Goalkeepers community was born out of both need and opportunity. Until 2016, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) provided a vital date in the international development calendar. It took place in September in New York, the same week the 193 member nations of the UN met for the General Assembly, and brought together leaders from different disciplines to tackle common goals. When Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, the rhythm of annual CGI meetings was put on pause. “It opened up a real question,” says Joe Cerrell, the Gates Foundation’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. Without this annual convening, where and how would policy-makers, innovators and advocates come together to advance their common goals—“what would take its place?” Goalkeepers was born in 2017. Since then, Goalkeepers and CGI, which made its return a few years later, have lived side by side in the annual UN General Assembly week programme. The gathering has welcomed headliners like Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron, and the one-name famous—the likes of Bono and Malala. But it is also a crucial networking event for the support acts, allowing Goalkeepers from different continents to combine forces. Take the meeting of Maryam Augie and Amina Abubakar in 2024. Both had dedicated their careers to tackling barriers to children’s education in Nigeria through their respective organisations, Illmi Children's Fund and Adaptive Solutions Africa. Once home, they partnered up, and launched two critical initiatives together across multiple states in Nigeria.

Some of them are innovating through approach. England rugby captain Maro Itoje’s The Pearl Fund, for instance, sponsors children’s education in Nigeria. To overcome what he saw as shortcomings with standard educational projects, the Fund is about depth rather than breadth: it supports each child for a full 15-year stretch and offers help in the round, providing food for the family of the students, thereby lessening the pressure to leave education to work. Cuppy, another UK Goalkeeper, similarly realized tuition itself was only part of the problem—her work funds education in Uganda which treats activity outside the classroom as vitally as that which happens in it, while another of her initiatives covers extra-curricular expenses for African students struggling with living costs at UK universities. Other UK Goalkeepers are innovators in the traditional sense. Professor Lindsay Hall has solved a problem that few even understood: why premature babies suffered such a plethora of seemingly unrelated health issues. It is the leading cause of death in children under five. Hall’s work on the microbiome, the collection of micro-organisms that live inside us, led her to realise that mothers of premature children had not had a chance to pass on a crucial microbe that reduces the risk of serious disease, among other benefits. Providing this to new-borns in the form of a supplement could end up saving millions of lives.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, funding to developing countries has fallen from £5.9bn in 2019 to £2.7bn four years later, and in 2024 the world’s eight wealthiest countries announced $17.2bn of foreign aid cuts. At the same time, new ideas have entered the fray. Blended finance models similar to the Global Fund—which combine development funds with outside investments—are on the rise. Convergence, the global network for blended finance, reported a five-year high in 2023, of $15bn. In the past decade, blended finance has mobilized over $200bn in capital towards sustainable development in low-income countries. Like Maro Itoje, funding education for a lifetime, and Will Poulter, making sure hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren are fed each day, these efforts are seeking new ways to tackle old problems. Emerging technologies, too, have the potential to be game-changing. The World Food Programme, for instance, is using AI for lifesaving assistance—currently, it estimates, this has improved hunger forecasting accuracy by up to 85 percent, allowing the Programme to act before crises escalate. Like Dr Toby Norman, improving healthcare for millions, and Prof Lindsay Hall, ensuring good outcomes for millions more, they are using the latest advances to break new ground.

Extraordinary individuals are needed more than ever.

TOM FLETCHER, Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE GOALKEEPERS

Meet the 2025 UK Goalkeepers

When the funding cuts were announced, they were all the harder to take because of the progress that had been made. Over the last two decades, living standards across the world had surged. Child mortality had halved. The number of people living in extreme poverty had fallen by two thirds. Vaccines had saved millions of lives. Two billion people had gained access to improved drinking water. Yet suddenly, all that progress was under threat. On 25 February, the UK government slashed its foreign aid budget by 40 percent, a cut of around £6bn per year by 2027. Around the same time, the US government announced its own proposals for sweeping cuts to international health and development funding. The moves came hot on the heels of a run of other countries’ rollbacks. Belgium had recently cut back by 25 percent, the Netherlands 30 percent, France 37 percent. Foreign aid had been decimated. The severity and swiftness of the cuts means the path ahead will be rocky. The coming year is likely to mark an unwelcome milestone: the first significant step backward in development progress this century. It will hit the most vulnerable the hardest—children living in lower-income countries, who have relied on vaccines to avoid getting sick, or who need something as simple as a bed net to protect themselves from malaria.

cut to the UK’s foreign aid budget (2025)

This year, five new UK Goalkeepers have been selected. They don’t follow a set theme—the overall 2025 Goalkeepers’ focus will be announced later this year—but they do embody an ethos. Each is tackling the hidden bottlenecks to progress, the underseen and the overlooked, through innovative ideas.

It’s known as the “hidden hunger”—the third of all UK schoolchildren, according to the British Nutrition Foundation, who arrive each morning unfed. By lunch time, researchers say, the damage will already have been done. Those hungry children will have to contend with poor concentration, low energy and increased irritability. Our bodies produce more ghrelin when hungry, a hormone linked to shorter attention spans. A study from the University of Leeds put the problem starkly: those who rarely ate breakfast scored, on average, two grades lower than their classmates. Due to the cost-of-living crisis, the problem is only getting worse. In 2023, the Food Foundation found the number of UK children in food poverty had doubled in a single year, up to four million. It’s an issue that actor Will Poulter became acutely aware of in 2023 when filming his Emmy-nominated role as a chef in acclaimed culinary drama The Bear. As he was considering his own relationship with food, he realised that, for so many, it was broken. “Food insecurity is not something that I’ve experienced, but millions of children in this country do,” says the 32-year-old. “It just made sense to leverage my association with the show in order to draw attention to it.” Poulter became a supporter of Magic Breakfast, a non-profit that provides school breakfasts to over 300,000 UK schoolchildren each morning. Crucially, they take great care not to stigmatise those who show up: 20 different items are available, making it feel more like a breakfast buffet, and there is an open-door policy. “There’s no onus to prove you need it,” says Poulter. The causes that Poulter champions are diverse—along with Magic Breakfast, he supports The Diana Award Anti-Bullying Programme and LGBTQ+ causes such as Rainbow Road and Choose Love—but for each he throws himself in as much as possible. For Magic

Breakfast, he flipped pancakes with rapper Big Zuu. For the Diana Award, he MC’d a UN General Assembly event featuring Prince Harry. Yet his interest in all of these causes stem, at least in part, from his own school experiences. Poulter struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues as a child, including depression, anxiety and OCD, while also suffering from dyslexia and dyspraxia. “And even in adulthood,” he says, “some things still affect me today.” He experienced some bullying. But what, he wonders, if that bullying had been even worse? What if he was gay or non-binary? What if, on top of everything, he had to go to school hungry? “And I can only imagine how those challenges would have been exacerbated,” he says. “How much harder I would have found it.” At the moment, he clarifies, his charity work is far from being his day job. “I’ve met so many inspiring people who dedicate their lives [to causes]; I just dip in and out.” Yet soon that could start to change. Although this year alone sees him star in three films (On Swift Horses, Death of a Unicorn, Warfare) and an episode of Black Mirror, he wants to set up his own foundation and devote even more of his time. “Certainly in the future,” he says. His next step will be isolating the specifics—what does he want to achieve, and how best to do that? Magic Breakfast is certainly delivering. Its work has inspired the UK government to take action. In April, a pilot programme of state-run breakfast clubs will open in 750 schools across the country. A government release noted the success of Magic Breakfast as a key factor.“I mean, it’s not an entirely selfless thing,” he says, when asked about giving so much of his time to these causes. “It gives meaning to my job. I’ve met some incredible people. And you can see—they really make an impact.”

WILL POULTER

It gives meaning to my job. I’ve met some incredible people. And you can see—they really make an impact.

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

click to discover

WILL POULTER

CUPPY

DR TOBY NORMAN

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

MARO ITOJE

The Gates Foundation was born when the Microsoft founder and his then-wife read a newspaper article in 1997 that they found shocking. Millions of children in lower-income countries were dying each year before their fifth birthday from diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia that were easily—but expensively—treated in wealthier countries. Struck by these preventable tragedies, they began consulting with experts, learning from local communities and researching disease and poverty more deeply, with the goal of using their voice and resources to improve global health and save lives. The Foundation was formed three years later. It celebrates its 25th anniversary this year in challenging times. Though, in many ways, it makes what its partners have been able to achieve over the past quarter century all the more valuable. The foundation is a core partner and major funder of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, or GPEI, which has helped reduce the incidence of polio by 99 percent since its founding in 1988. Thanks to efforts to reach every child with polio vaccines, wild polio now only exists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and over 20 million people are walking today who otherwise would have been paralyzed by the virus. A crucial focus has been to think beyond straightforward funding towards creating models that are efficient and impactful. In 2000, for example, the foundation co-founded Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance as a public-private global partnership, along with country governments, agencies like WHO, UNICEF and the World Bank, and other private sector and civil society partners. Gavi bulk-buys vaccines, vastly decreasing the cost through economies of scale, and works with partners and governments to distribute them to low-income nations. To date, more than 1.1 billion children have been vaccinated across 78 countries. This is estimated to have saved over 18.8 million lives. Crucially, as more people are vaccinated, economies, too, become healthier—more people stay in school and contribute more to their communities. Every $1 invested in immunization returns $54 in economic benefits. As countries grow, Gavi’s model empowers them to take greater ownership of their immunization programs. Indonesia, once a recipient of Gavi support, has seen its economy grow and its program is now self-sustaining. Today, a child born in a Gavi-supported country is 70 percent less likely to die from a vaccine-preventable disease before their fifth birthday than they were in the year Gavi was founded. The foundation has also always put an emphasis on big ideas and evidence-based decision-making. In 2002, it helped found the Global Fund, a global partnership to fight three of the deadliest yet preventable diseases in the world: HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB. In this effort, which so far has cut the combined death rate of the diseases by 61 percent, the Global Fund has been an innovator both in blended finance—combining its own grants with investments from development finance institutions—and results-based financing, which means releasing funds when specific milestones are hit. It has saved 65 million lives since 2002. For TB specifically, the world is on the verge of what could be an historic breakthrough: a TB vaccine has reached late-stage trials for the first time in 100 years, and is the first potential vaccine for both adolescents and adults, who account for the bulk of the epidemic. “The enthusiasm for volunteering [for stage three trials] has been so high we reached full enrolment almost a year ahead of schedule,” says Nina Russell, director of TB & HIV research and development. “So yeah, we’re pretty excited.” If successful, both the Global Fund and Gavi would help get the vaccine to where it’s needed the most.

Progress is possible, but not inevitable.

Speaking the day after the British government announced its cuts to foreign aid, Joe Cerrell was, understandably, downbeat. But the focus, as ever, was: what’s next? “It’s very short-sighted,” he says of the UK government’s decision, adding that the majority of the British public were “supportive of playing a role internationally”. The imperative for the Foundation now, however, is as straightforward as it is challenging: “What are we going to do to make sure that a lot of the progress that we’ve invested in doesn’t start going in the opposite direction?” He references the Goalkeepers mantra: “Progress is possible, but not inevitable.” Now more than ever, no-one can afford to sit back. Bill Gates, when discussing this year’s upcoming September Goalkeepers event with his top team, was adamant: they shouldn’t shy away from the challenges they now face. It should be front and centre of the messaging. “He really wants to make sure we paint a picture about what’s under threat,” says Cerrell, “about what’s at stake.” Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. Development isn’t dying—it’s evolving. And this shift was already underway.

will poulter

Growing up, Cuppy—international musician, philanthropist, and proud owner of three degrees—wanted to be an ice skater. Her mother took her to Alexandra Palace’s rink, upon which she realised ice-skating was not for her (“I was so bad at it”). After that, a chef, “and I am not a good chef”. Then a dog trainer. At one point, a novelist. At 12, she wrote an entire book. The point, she says now, is not that these things didn’t work out, but that she was encouraged by her parents to attempt them. “I was told I can do anything,” says the 32-year-old. It’s been something she’s tried to pass along to others ever since. Cuppy—full name Florence Ifeoluwa Otedola—was born in Nigeria to wealthy parents before moving to London at 16. Her philanthropy began in ad hoc fashion. In 2014, aged 18, she began supporting the education of Nigerian girls who reached out over social media. In 2018, she set up The Cuppy Foundation. But it took an early misstep to find its focus. She knew she wanted to support girls’ education. In Nigeria, just 53 percent of girls are in secondary education, according to UNICEF. And in the northern states, many of which have been shaped by Islamic fundamentalists Boko Haram, it’s far lower. In the northern state of Borno, less than a third of girls attend school. In the northern state of Sokoto, it’s just 15 percent. As many as half of those out of school, it’s estimated, become child brides. Save the Children estimates that west and central Africa accounts for nearly half (9,600) of marriage-related deaths globally—due to violence, and complications from pregnancy—which is four times higher than anywhere else in the world. In Borno, Cuppy funded textbooks and planned to build a school. But upon visiting the capital, Maiduguri, she realised “all these young girls were malnourished, they needed healthcare. You cannot give a book to a sick child”. The foundation has since worked with Save the Children to provide humanitarian care alongside education. This has involved training 1,500 health workers

in adolescent and maternal nutrition, and engaging nearly 100 local communities to tackle discriminatory gender norms.The realisation that education alone was not enough became a roadmap. Today, her approach to philanthropy is all about providing “cushioning”, the indirect support that too often is overlooked. This ethos feeds into her individual projects. In Lagos, Nigeria, a “street-to-school” initiative for vulnerable children has delivered over 38,000 school meals. In Uganda, a partnership with Lutengo Youth supports a school with a particular focus on the extra-curricular: funding football and dance for over 100 students. “Education,” she says, “is not just about the classroom.” That same ethos is also at the heart of the educational fund that bears her name. It was set up while at Oxford University in 2021, studying for her third degree—an MSc in African Studies—after she had an experience that left a deep impression. A fellow student from Africa dropped out, not due to tuition fees, which were covered on a scholarship, but simply his cost of living. She remembers he didn’t even have a winter coat. Cuppy set up The Cuppy Fund, active in Oxford, King’s College London and New York University, offering financial assistance to African students to help cover non-academic expenses, from essentials like a coat to travel costs.“I am the product of cushioning. It’s not just my education, it’s everything else around me,” she says. “It’s about making sure people are supported.”Last June, Cuppy was appointed the first ever King’s Trust International Ambassador by King Charles. It’s a role that reflects her unique status: an African empowering Africans, but able to see the challenges from a different point of view. “It allows me to be sensitive enough here in the UK to recognise all the privileges,” she says. “And it allows me to go back home and realise all the potentials.”

CUPPY

I am the product of cushioning. It’s not just my education, it’s everything else around me. It’s about making sure people are supported.

While working on a study of frontline medical workers, Dr Toby Norman discovered something surprising. Their biggest issue wasn’t how they were helping people—but who, exactly, those people were.The study, which Norman undertook in 2015 as part of his University of Cambridge PhD, involved speaking to medical staff across Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. Each looked after thousands of patients, but had little way of tracking their medical history. The reason: many of those patients had no form of ID. One in four children born today are in that position. In low-income settings, like sub-Saharan Africa, it’s one in two. In total, more than 850m people worldwide can't prove who they are. The impact is profound. For medical care, patients can’t be tracked from one treatment to the next. Across a population, comprehensive vaccination campaigns become incredibly challenging. In 2022, data from the government of Bangladesh suggested timely immunisation coverage for measles was close to 100 percent. Peer-reviewed studies later suggested it was less than half that. Outbreaks continue to this day. “How do you get a discrepancy that big?” says Norman, 37. “It’s because it’s so hard to trace.” Norman has spent the past decade building a solution through his non-profit startup Simprints, based in Cambridge. His technology stands to transform more than just vital vaccine rollouts. It has implications in almost every other field of humanitarian work—from agriculture to education—where lack of identification can lead to fraud and corruption, or simply mistakes: the right resources delivered to the wrong hands. This has the potential, therefore, to increase the efficacy of all international development—making sure aid gets to where it needs to go. “Lack of ID prevents programmes from being as effective as they could be,” he says. Simprints considered multiple approaches. An iris-scanner would be accurate, but far too expensive. Experimenting with a thumbprint scanner, meanwhile, revealed how geared smartphones are for high-income settings. It wasn’t sensitive enough, Norman found, to detect fingerprint ridges worn down from a lifetime of labour or scorched from cooking. They just showed as white. But Norman and his team persisted with fingerprints. They gathered a dataset of 135,000 samples and tested different ways

of scanning them. It remains the largest academic dataset of developing world fingerprints. An ultra high-resolution optical sensor proved to be the breakthrough. After frontline workers log a new patient, their records are added to a database which interfaces with government records. For “last mile” use, it needed to be bundled into a device that was shockproof, waterproof and able to work for days on a single charge. By 2017, the design was settled: it was 105g, all-but indestructible, with an accuracy rate as high as 99 percent. As frontline workers are often offline for days at a time, each device would be synced with the latest, geographically relevant batch of records before workers enter the field. One large-scale deployment began in Ghana in 2023 to support Ghana Health Services with delivery of malaria vaccines. By the end of 2025 Simprints will be in 586 clinics—ten percent of those in the entire country. Globally, it has topped three million biometric enrolments, ensuring healthcare and aid reached vulnerable populations in 17 countriesBut the biggest challenge, says Norman, is one they’re only now on the verge of cracking. Babies are often in the most need of medical care, but remain the toughest subjects for biometrics. The key markers are still in flux: their fingerprints growing, their faces changing shape. In May, Simprints announced a collaboration with UK microchip manufacturer ARM, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and Gavi, the vaccine alliance, to solve, for the first time, the issue of infant ID. Three separate pictures would be taken, triangulated by AI and machine learning. Taken together, an algorithm would then be able to predict how those markers will change over time. “You could actually link a child from birth to a vaccine record,” says Norman. The most promising markers, says Norman, are not the ones you might suspect: a baby’s ears, a baby’s feet, a baby’s palms. The kind of close-up pictures, taken with love, a parent might capture. Yet ones, says Norman, that could ensure their health until they’re taking pictures of their own kids, and beyond. Currently, says Norman, it’s getting better day by day.It is, he says, “almost like magic”.

DR TOBY NORMAN

Lack of ID prevents programmes from being as effective as they could be.

The leading cause of death in children under five is not war or famine, but simply being born too soon. One in ten babies worldwide arrive prematurely. But in low-income settings, it’s not only more widespread—half of all pre-term births happen in southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—but the outcomes are more severe. For those who arrive two months early, half die due to lack of cost-effective medical care and support. Yet while some of the causes of the health problems associated with pre-term births have long been established—such as underdeveloped lungs—others have, until recently, remained a mystery. Pre-term babies have an increased risk of chronic inflammatory diseases, autoimmune conditions and infection risk. If they survive into later life, there are even suspected implications for mental health. But why should that be?The cause of these issues, Professor Lindsay Hall has found, stems from the micro-organisms in our gut—lifeforms whose evolutionary history stretches back billions of years, and which program our immune systems, and other key physiological processes, from birth. The implications of Hall’s groundbreaking research are profound: microbial therapies can prevent those same complications from ever occurring. “We could reboot your system, essentially,” says Hall. Hall is the multi-award-winning Chair of Microbiome Research at The University of Birmingham, a Wellcome Trust Investigator, and a group leader at bioscience research centre, the Quadram Institute. But it was undertaking postdoctoral research on microbes that live on and in us at University College Cork that first turned her on to beneficial micro-organisms. Hall thinks of these invisible ecosystems—microbiomes—in terms of ecology. The inhabitants of the skin are different from those of the gut, just as different creatures live in deserts and forests.It was a native of the gut—Bifidobacterium—that Hall discovered was capable of influencing everything from infection resistance to even, potentially, cognitive development. And it was also one, Hall found, that was most lacking in premature babies: their mothers had not yet passed on their own. “Basically, you’re seeded at birth,” says Hall. “The biggest impacts on your future health and wellbeing are in your first 1,000 days. That’s where we’re going to have the biggest impact if we can intervene.”

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

And the biggest impacts on your future health and wellbeing are in your first 1,000 days. So that’s where we’re going to have the biggest impact if we can intervene.

When England rugby captain Maro Itoje set up The Pearl Fund in 2023 to help children in Nigeria, he faced an age-old issue. How, with limited resources, to do the most good?Focusing on education, he felt, made the most sense—something that, once given, could never be taken away. It was also an issue close to his heart. Unlike most sports stars, the Saracens lock has both an undergraduate degree (in politics, from the School of Oriental and African Studies) and an MBA (from Warwick Business School, which he did part-time). His parents insisted on the former as a condition for playing rugby. He wrote one of his final papers on foreign aid. “Once you receive a good education, it’s something that stays with you,” says the 30-year-old. For Itoje, it means a career that can continue long after his rugby days are behind him. For developing countries, it means systemic change: better education leads to better employment and better health; it even fosters gender equality.It was, Itoje knew, an area where sub-Saharan Africa was falling badly behind. The region accounts for half of all the children globally not attending school. And something Itoje once read had stuck with him: the way rice given as aid had helped in the short-term, but destroyed local farming economies over the long-term. Itoje wanted to fund something that could grow. Nigeria, the birthplace of his parents, seemed a good place to plant the first seeds. In designing the Pearl Fund’s approach, Itoje wanted to innovate—he wanted to see how it could overcome some of the traditional limitations of similar schemes. A 2023 report by UNICEF showed that as many as 60 percent of children not attending education had, at one point, been enrolled. It wasn’t enough, Itoje realised, to simply fund their tuition. The Pearl Fund would take a holistic approach. It would cover students’ transport, to ensure they can get there, school uniforms for them to change into, and monthly food packages for their family, lessening the pressure for the child to leave education to work.

Itoje also wanted the Pearl Fund to think long term. The aim, he says, is to cover 15 years of a student’s life, from early childhood until leaving school entirely. “The key principle is depth as opposed to breadth,” says Itoje. Itoje estimated an annual cost per student of around £1,500. The Pearl Fund began work in conjunction with local charity CDLi in 2023, partly out of practicality, but also because “it counters this white savior narrative, especially around charities”. The initial cohort is 40 students, with the hope to add more in the future. Putting it into practice has been both inspiring and, sometimes, heart-breaking. When the selection process began, there was a miscommunication on numbers, with 200 candidates presented. “It was obviously too much,” he says. “But it highlights the level of need.” Orphans and fatherless children are a particular priority, because they tend to have the worst outcomes. When Itoje visits, a child will often say: I wish you were my dad. At which point he wonders, idly: could he smuggle them back in a suitcase? “If I could,” he says, “I would.” When he visited the Pearl Fund’s students in 2024, a year after the scheme began, he noticed the difference immediately. They looked fuller, healthier. Crucially, they looked confident. “When I first met them, they were very meek and mild,” he says. “Now, one thing about Nigerians, they're not meek, they're not mild.”For the future, keeping his promises is the top priority. He doesn’t want to let the students down, and that means raising money to see all the students through their school career. But he also wants the program to evolve. He imagines adding a mentoring scheme, helping students get work after leaving education. Currently, he’s partnering with UK-based charity, Action Tutoring, for a separate project that would provide extra tuition for disadvantaged students back home. At 30, like any athlete, he knows there’s more road behind him than ahead. But Itoje is just getting started. “I've committed to help these kids for a length of time that far outweighs my career,” he says. “And the ambition is to grow. I would love to have this running the rest of my life.”

MARO ITOJE

I've committed to help these kids for a length of time that far outweighs my career, and the ambition is to grow. I would love to have this running the rest of my life.

A study in The Lancet HIV predicted the cuts will cause up to 2.9 million additional HIV-related deaths by 2030. “Unmitigated funding reductions could significantly reverse progress in the HIV response,” it concluded plainly, “disproportionately affecting sub-Saharan African countries and key and vulnerable populations.” That 2030 date carries a particular sting. In 2015, the UN set out 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The idea was that by 2030 all 193 member states—working in global partnership on problems both foreign and domestic—should make measurable progress in areas ranging from poverty to hunger, health to education. Last June, the UN reported only 17 percent were on track. The aid cuts threw all targets further into jeopardy. And yet, the goals were never meant to rely on governments alone. The responsibility was always meant to be shared across sectors. Not just the state but also business, philanthropy, civil society. And now, that principle has renewed urgency. Innovative charities, unique funding models, gigantic technological strides and, perhaps more simply, extraordinary individuals, are needed more than ever. For the Gates Foundation, the non-profit set up by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2000, the power and importance of extraordinary individuals are embodied in a group they call “Goalkeepers”—global innovators and advocates, scientists and philanthropists, household names pushing for change and names you’ve likely never heard of who are transforming the world. The ones, now, helping keep these goals alive, even as governments see them slip.

Each year has a theme. Last year, it was nutrition, and the pressing challenge ahead: how to feed, in a rapidly-warming world, the 400m children who aren’t getting the nutrients they need? The 2024 event welcomed an array of diverse doers and thinkers working to solve the problem. Ten were recognised as “Champions”—individuals who had single-handedly made great strides. Some were advocates, ensuring that advances in nutritional science were delivering as much good as possible. Beza Beshah Haile, for instance, ran an organization in Ethiopia called HOPE-SBH, dedicated to making pre-natal care, including maternal nutrition, more accessible. Working with policymakers, she advocates for the mandatory fortification of wheat flour with essential nutrients. Others were pushing the boundaries of technology. Dr Zahra Hoodbhoy, associate professor of paediatrics and child health at Aga Khan University in Pakistan, was combining next-generation prenatal vitamins and AI tools to empower community workers to tackle maternal and child health. This year, five new UK Goalkeepers have been selected and will attend the event in New York. The individuals don’t reflect a set theme—the overall 2025 Goalkeepers’ focus will be announced later this year—but they do embody an ethos. Each is tackling the hidden bottlenecks to progress, the underseen and the overlooked, through innovative ideas.

There would be talks, but there would also be demonstrations and musical interludes to increase its appeal. The team consulted Richard Curtis on the production. One year, a discussion about advances in crops that could withstand climate change included a cooking demonstration. A panel about forced marriage was preceded by a video of young girls on their wedding days; the video was accompanied by Broadway singers. Headliners like Barrack Obama and Emmanuel Macron bought the house down. As did the one-name famous, the likes of Bono and Malala, reflecting an understanding from the Foundation that while funding for projects is vital, just as key are the voices who make the issues understood. But it was also a crucial networking event for the support acts, allowing Goalkeepers from different continents to combine forces. Take the meeting of Maryam Augie and Amina Abubakar in [TK date]. Both had dedicated their careers to tackling barriers to children’s education in Nigeria through their respective organisations, Illmi Children's Fund and Adaptive Solutions Africa. Once home, they partnered up, and launched two critical initiatives together across multiple states in Nigeria.

When the funding cuts were announced, they were all the harder to take because of the progress that had been made. Over the last two decades, living standards across the world had surged.

One thing is clear: this is the moment to finish what The Gates Foundation started.

Joe Cerrell, Gates Foundation’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and East Asia

As a key part of the Foundation’s strategy, Goalkeepers not only exemplifies this commitment to innovation, but underscores the importance of individuals: those whose breakthrough ideas can underpin these large, tectonic shifts in global development. The community’s work also reflects how the Foundation’s focus has evolved over its lifetime. In this, its 25th anniversary year, the Foundation is doubling down on its dedication to the issue that started it all—the infants still needlessly dying, the children still without adequate care. It’s an issue, in various ways, all the UK Goalkeepers are tackling, and at a time when it could hardly be more vital. Will Poulter, for example, is a supporter of Magic Breakfast, a UK non-profit tackling what’s known as the “hidden hunger”—the third of all UK schoolchildren who arrive each morning unfed, and who score, on average, two grades lower than their classmates. Or take Dr Toby Norman, whose non-profit startup Simprints is solving an issue that had long-stymied healthcare professionals in low-income settings—many patients had no form of ID, making basic healthcare a challenge and comprehensive vaccination campaigns impossible. One aspect of his work is groundbreaking research that uses AI and machine learning to help accurately identify young children so they can receive the care they need. This is challenging because children’s biometric markers change as they grow. If his company can crack it, it could save countless lives. As it has evolved, the Foundation has also placed extra emphasis on increasing women’s economic power: addressing the question of how to ensure that, once they’re healthy, women and their families thrive, not just survive. “When we look at economic progress and prosperity around the world,” says Anita Zaidi, president of the Foundation’s Gender Equality Division, “a big part of that has come from the economic participation of women. When women are not participating in the economy, societies cannot develop. If you don't think about gender in the strategy, you're not going to meet your goals.” Even within leadership roles in development, the lack of female voices meant women were being overlooked. During polio vaccination campaigns, she says, female aid workers in some communities were often putting in 10-hour days, but no thought had been given to access to toilets, or safe spaces where they could gather. “A lot of work in global health is done by women, but they were not the people we were giving the money to,” says Zaidi. “It is a much bigger part of our story than it was when I joined ten years ago.”

Bifidobacterium was first discovered in 1899 at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. It had been used as a probiotic for many years, but until recently its wider role hadn’t been appreciated. It was only with the increasing speed and affordability of DNA and RNA sequencing that Hall’s team was able to identify which microbes were present in pre-term infants, what might be missing, and how these patterns related to diseases. Steadily, the full scope of Bifidobacterium’s impact on health outcomes came into focus. And, just as critically, the negative effect of its absence. “We knew Bifidobacterium is good and beneficial,” says Hall, “but the question was how is it good and beneficial? That’s what we needed to understand.” A 2020 study that Hall and her team co-authored found that supplementing premature babies with a particular Bifidobacterium had a dual impact. Not only did it reduce levels of bacteria that are associated with serious infections, it was also able to break down elements of the mothers’ milk that the human body alone couldn’t process, improving the baby’s nutrition as well. Another study, also co-authored by Hall later that year, found Bifidobacterium supplements halved the risk of necrotising enterocolitis, a devastating disease in which the intestinal wall dies. It affects up to 15 percent of premature babies and has a 40 percent mortality rate. In contexts where traditional neonatal care is limited, microbial treatments would be especially valuable and cost effective. Hall is currently involved with studies designed to develop such therapies, tailored especially to populations in at-risk locations such as Zimbabwe. Helpfully, while the Bifidobacterium needs to be alive, it’s more than happy to be freeze-dried for transit, eliminating the need for complicated “cold-chain” logistics. But Hall admits they’re just getting started. Tracing the other health impacts of the trillions of interactions taking place right now between microbes in our intestines is a far-reaching project. Hall’s team is even undertaking studies of the microbiome’s impact on cancer immune response. As Hall herself says, “Everyone in this field has got long careers ahead of them.” And thanks to Hall, a great many more babies will have long lives ahead of them, too.

The world is on the verge of what could be an historic breakthrough.

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Each Goalkeeper is tackling the hidden bottlenecks to progress.

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Photo Credit: Simprints

Latest version of the SimprintsID mobile app, using AI algorithms to match infants to their vaccine records in Ghana.

Photo Credit: Kevin Hagen / Stringer

Photographer: Ruth Samuels

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

MARO ITOJE

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HALL

DR TOBY NORMAN

CUPPY

will poulter

Global leadership, too, is changing. South Africa is co-hosting the latest replenishment of the Global Fund—an eighth cycle of funding that will see the fund aim to save 23m more lives by 2029. It marks the first time a government from the Global South is playing the role. And let’s be clear: while government funding has taken a hit, it’s far from gone. Governments will still play a crucial role in supporting vital development work, and need to be part of whatever the new normal looks like. The question is, what will the new paradigm be once the dust has settled? In May, a quarter of a century after it was founded, Bill Gates announced when the Gates Foundation will end: in 2045, 20 years’ time, at which point he will have given almost all of his fortune away. It’s a decision that reflects many things. An acknowledgement, in some ways, that for progress not to be paralyzed, now is the time to go all-in. An anticipation, in other ways, of the great technological advances to come—from biomedical tools to the promise of AI. But also, something else. The hope, and the belief, that the self-sustaining systems the Gates Foundation has helped put in place, along with the extraordinary individuals it has championed—from Gavi to the Global Fund to the Goalkeepers themselves—will, by then, have made the foundation itself redundant. One thing is clear: this is the moment to finish what it started. The foundation wants to get child deaths as close to zero as possible over the next 20 years, and see countries flourish. “We’ve got it this far,” says Cerrell. “If those children go on to be healthy, they can be productive, they can be part of the economy.” They can, like the Goalkeepers, “drive change”.

estimated improvement in hunger forecasting accuracy from AI.

cut to the UK’s foreign aid budget (2025)