The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is awarding $40 million to the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health to expand a program to improve reproductive health around the globe.
The 10-year-grant - which officials called the sixth largest in Hopkins' history - will go to the school's Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. The institute trains leaders of reproductive health programs in the developing world, where complications from pregnancy and childbirth are a major cause of disease and death.
Scheduled to be announced today, the award will bring Gates' total contributions to Hopkins to at least $100 million over the past six years.
The World Health Organization estimates that 123 million women worldwide, mostly in developing countries, do not use contraception though they have said they want to, that 38 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, and that millions have unsafe abortions.
"The need in terms of global population and reproductive health is enormous," said Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean of the public health school.
In 1997, the Gates Foundation awarded the School of Public Health $2.25 million to start a training program on family planning. Two years later, it donated $20 million to establish the reproductive health institute, which was named after the Microsoft chairman and his wife.
"This has been a terrific initiative that has gotten off the ground entirely because the Gates Foundation, several years ago, was willing to invest in the vision we had that the way to move population and family health issues forward in the less developed areas of the world is by training high-quality people, and ultimately being able to invest in them and their institutions," Sommer said.
The grants have allowed Hopkins the flexibility to determine where reproductive health programs such as family planning and maternity care are most needed and focus on those areas, Sommer said. The institute has programs in China, India, Indonesia, Peru, Guatemala, Uganda and elsewhere.
The Gates Foundation has made several other large donations to Hopkins in recent years, including $20 million in 2000 to expand research in global nutrition and $40 million jointly to the School of Public Health and the University of Maryland School of Medicine to speed development of a measles vaccine.
