SEATTLE _ A month after the death of a prominent Saudi journalist, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has cut ties with a charity founded by the Saudi leader linked to the murder, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The move to end a partnership between the Gates Foundation and the Saudi-based Misk Foundation, first reported Thursday by Fortune and other outlets, is the latest pullback by a Western organization over the Oct. 2 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of the regime and a columnist at The Washington Post.
The decision affects a joint initiative with the Misk Foundation, known as the Misk Grand Challenges, that involved "grants to organizations around the world where young people are working in innovative ways on some of the most pressing development challenges," according to a statement released Thursday by the Gates Foundation.
Last year, the $41.3 billion Gates Foundation committed $5 million to the initiative, which was to be matched by the Misk Foundation. The Misk Foundation was launched by the crown prince, the Saudi kingdom's de facto ruler, who Western and Turkish intelligence agencies say ordered Khashoggi's murder. That made the partnership untenable, Gates Foundation officials said.
"Jamal Khashoggi's abduction and murder are extremely troubling," said the Gates Foundation statement. "We are observing current events with concern, and we do not plan to fund any subsequent rounds of the Misk Grand Challenges program."
The Gates Foundation's decision comes a couple weeks after a range of prominent business leaders and government officials protested the killing by withdrawing from a business conference hosted by the crown prince.
That lag time may reflect the difficulty of the decision, said David Callahan, founder of the trade publication Inside Philanthropy. "I would imagine they really didn't want to pull the plug on this thing," Callahan said in an interview. "But obviously, the optics are really bad: the world's biggest charitable foundation in bed with a guy who kills political dissidents."
The Gates Foundation, which so far had paid $1.5 million into the Misk initiative, will continue to support entrepreneurs who had already received funding, but will not support new grants, according to the foundation statement.
Although the Misk Foundation had numerous other philanthropic partners, including Harvard University, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it's not clear whether these partners would follow the Gates Foundation's lead.
Harvard, Google and LinkedIn did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokeswoman for Twitter declined to comment.
Though this was hardly a large project by the standards of the Gates Foundation, the crown prince described the Seattle foundation's "collaboration" as "an essential initiative for the Misk Foundation," in a statement last year on the Misk Grand Challenges website, according to a report by Philanthropy News Digest.
Callahan said that the benefit to the Misk Foundation would have gone well beyond the $5 million the Gates Foundation had committed, by serving as a base that Misk officials could have used to attract additional contributions from other donors. "Being funded by the Gates Foundation has huge cachet," he said.
Thursday's decision also highlights a growing dilemma for big players in the world of global philanthropy. On the one hand, youth-focused programs like the Grand Challenges are widely seen as critical in a developing world where hundreds of millions of young people lack education or job prospects.
On the other, philanthropies like the Gates Foundation must carefully assess the reputational risks of collaborating with wealthy yet controversial partners, such as Saudi Arabia.
"Historically, there has been a lot of philanthropic money that doesn't come from the best characters, from John D. Rockefeller onward," said Callahan. "So it's this perennial conundrum: How much do you care where the money came from versus how much good can it do in the world? I think that's a tough choice."
