Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, is to make the largest ever single charitable donation with a pledge of $10 billion for vaccine work over the next decade, it was announced Friday.

Gates said that he hoped the coming 10 years will be the decade of the vaccine to reduce dramatically child mortality in the world’s poorest countries. It is calculated that his pledge alone could save more than eight million lives.

Announcing the commitment, which far outstrips even the enormous previous donations by his own foundation, Gates called for increased investment in vaccines by governments and the private sector to help research, develop and deliver vaccines.

"We must make this the decade of vaccines," Mr Gates said. "Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before."

Gates and his wife, Melinda, made their announcement at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, where they were joined by Julian Lob-Levyt, the head of the vaccine consortium the GAVI Alliance.

"Vaccines are a miracle - with just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime," Melinda Gates said. "We’ve made vaccines our number-one priority at the Gates Foundation because we’ve seen firsthand their incredible impact on children's lives."

Among the infections to be targeted with the money are rotavirus, which causes severe diarrhea, and pneumococcal disease, which causes pneumonia, blood poisoning, and a form of meningitis.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has used a model developed by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to project the potential impact of vaccines on childhood deaths over the next 10 years.

By significantly scaling up the delivery of life-saving vaccines in developing countries to 90 percent coverage - including the new vaccines to prevent severe diarrhea and pneumonia - the model suggests that the deaths of 7.6 million children under 5 could be prevented between now and 2019.

It also estimates that an additional 1.1 million children could be saved with the rapid introduction of a malaria vaccine beginning in 2014.

Gates said that if additional vaccines are developed and introduced in this decade - such as for tuberculosis - even more lives could be saved.

The new funding is in addition to the $4.5 billion that the Gates Foundation has already committed to vaccine research, development and delivery over the last 10 years.

A large portion of the money is expected to go to the GAVI Alliance, which was launched at the World Economic Forum 10 years ago this week. To date GAVI, which focuses on public private partnerships, has reached 257 million additional children with new and underused vaccines, and prevented 5 million deaths.

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