When the news emerged last year that Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates were divorcing, the question of whether their foundation would lose ready access to its founders’ substantial resources quickly arose.On Wednesday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appeared to answer those doubts with an announcement that it will significantly speed up its giving in areas including global health, economic development, gender equality and education as its co-founders continue to pump money into what was already by most measures the world’s largest charitable foundation.The foundation said it would increase the rate of its grant making from nearly $6 billion annually before the pandemic to $9 billion each year by 2026. To put that $3 billion increase in context, the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros and itself one of the nation’s biggest philanthropies, reported total spending in 2020 of $1.4 billion.After promising last su …
