10 HBCUs to get millions to expand testing

Gates Foundation will provide $15M over three years to be shared

Ten historically Black colleges and universities will receive millions of dollars in investments to support on-campus coronavirus testing facilities, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private foundation, announced Tuesday.

The Gates Foundation, which focuses on providing health and education opportunities, said it will provide $15 million over three years to be shared between 10 HBCUs, which have felt the sting of coronavirus closures.

The donations will seek to develop and provide personnel, training, lab equipment, test kits and training and laboratory capacity for rapid test processing to six of the 10 universities that will serve as testing hubs.

The hubs will process tests from surrounding HBCUs, or “spokes,” according to the Gates Foundation Director of Strategy Planning & Management Toni Hoover.

The grants will allow these HBCUs to “test all of their students, faculty and staff, as often as their protocols will require,” Hoover said.

The investment by the Gates Foundation is the latest push to help fund HBCUs, which have limited resources to address the COVID-19 pandemic on their campuses.

“Safely reopening campuses and keeping them open requires a number of things, but it absolutely requires access to rapid, effective COVID-19 testing,” said Allan Golston, president of the United States Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, during a press conference Tuesday.

Though all colleges have been hurt by coronavirus closures and face uncertainties in the fall, the impact is particularly acute for historically Black colleges and universities, which often lack funding even in normal years.

And with students who often have no place to go, some of these universities have returned to a full-time, on-campus schedule, while others are splitting between virtual learning and in-class studies.

That could be tough as Black Americans struggle with the highest COVID-19 mortality rate in the country, according to data reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

As of Oct. 13, donations from the Gates Foundation have been given to multiple schools around the South: Florida A&M University; Hampton University in Virginia; Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Meharry Medical College in Tennessee; Morehouse School of Medicine in Georgia; and Xavier University of Louisiana.

Lab equipment company Thermo Fisher Scientific donated $25 million in diagnostic instruments and test kits to HBCUs earlier this month.

Contributing: Chris Quintana, USA TODAY, Safiya Charles and Byron Dobson, USA TODAY Network Education coverage at USA TODAY recently was funded in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation did not provide editorial input.