The Los Angeles billionaire Jeff Skoll, who has long made preparing for pandemics part of his philanthropic work, is putting $100 million into his foundation this week to fight the spread of Covid-19, the Skoll Foundation is announcing Friday.
The infusion of cash will enable the foundation to nearly quadruple its 2020 grant making to $200 million. Skoll is directing the bulk of the foundation’s new grants to address public health, economic, and social effects of the pandemic. He has earmarked $100 million of it to back two priorities: finding solutions to challenges associated with Covid-19 testing and contact tracing and getting respiratory devices and other medical equipment to countries that can’t afford to buy it or don’t have the infrastructure to properly support it.
The money will go to both nonprofits and businesses that provide a benefit to society. While the foundation has not decided which groups will receive the new money Skoll is putting into the foundation, its recent pandemic-related grants provide clues to the types of organizations that might.
On the testing and contact-tracing side, those include Africa CDC, Partners in Health, and two groups that track regional disease in Africa — the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance Foundation and the East African Integrated Disease Surveillance Network. It also gave money to Mirimus, a company that is looking at a new approach to serological testing, a key part of gaining a deeper understanding of how Covid-19 spreads and of potential immunity to the disease, said Bruce Lowry, a senior adviser to the foundation.
Don Gips, the foundation’s CEO and a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa during the Obama administration, said the foundation’s goal is to help those working to tamp down the spread of the virus before opening businesses and the economy more broadly.
“If we don’t deal with the virus in a comprehensive, global way, human suffering will be magnified and extended,” said Gips.
Competition for Equipment
In its effort to get medical equipment to countries with few resources, Lowry said the foundation will focus on identifying and supporting efforts to develop “promising breathing-assistance technologies that are affordable and can be produced safely and rapidly even with existing constraints in global supply chains, distributed broadly where they are needed most, and used in geographies with limited medical infrastructure.”
Lowry said the challenges poor countries face in getting such equipment right now are significant because many are competing for the equipment with the United States and Europe but have less purchasing power, fewer trained medical staff, and other challenges.
“Between lack of supplies and infrastructure, power shortages, and collapsed value chains, the conditions are ripe for a perfect storm,” Lowry said. “Our hope is to invest in the solutions that have the potential to alleviate the potentially devastating impacts that Covid-19 could cause in [these countries].”
Urgent Threats
Skoll, who was born in Canada and became a U.S. citizen in 2007, is no stranger to supporting efforts to prepare for and fight pandemics and other worldwide dangers. In 2009 he directed $100 million to create the Skoll Global Threats Fund to tackle five threats: climate change, water scarcity, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and conflict in the Middle East.
In 2017 he joined forces with Bill and Melinda Gates and other ultrawealthy philanthropists to create Co-Impact, an effort to tackle the problems that trap people in poverty and poor health.
Skoll’s net worth has been pegged at about $5 billion, according to Forbes. He built his fortune as the first full-time employee and president of eBay, which he helped lead from 1995 to 2001. He started the Skoll Foundation in 1999. Today its assets and those of the Skoll Fund, a supporting organization associated with the Silicon Valley Foundation, stand at a total of $1.2 billion, according to foundation officials.
He went on to found Capricorn Investment Group and is the founder and chairman of Participant Media, a socially conscious film and media production company that backed the 2011 film Contagion, a thriller about a highly contagious and rapidly spreading virus. The film was created to raise awareness of the danger of pandemics and their rise in modern times.
