The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation- -Can It Change the World?

The Basics

The Rockefellers of the 21st Century, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and his wife, Melinda, founded the largest charitable foundation in existence today.

Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates, Sr. and Patty Stonesifer (a former VP at Microsoft). The present organization was formed in January 2000 by merging the Gates Learning Foundation and the William H. Gates Foundation, earlier creations of Bill Gates.

The foundation has a $29 billion endowment and gives more than a billion dollars (at least 5% of its assets must be used each year) a year to "improve access to advances in global health and learning."

The Gates Foundation has funded scholarships for underrepresented minority college students, AIDS prevention, and diseases that strike mainly in the Third World such as polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, and yellow fever.

The Problem

Bill and Melinda Gates, along with the singer Bono, were named by TIME Magazine as "Persons of the Year 2005" for their charitable work. TIME celebrated the unlikely collaboration of the great rock star and the geeky couple as they declared war on poverty and disease.

The Gates Foundation spends 60% of its charitable dollars on public health issues. That is about the same as the World Health Organization (WHO) spends. Former President, Jimmy Carter, calls the Gates Foundation, "The most important organization in the world." He adds simply, "They know what they're doing."

Jim Kim, former director of WHO's HIV/AIDS department says that the field of global health was languishing before the Gates came along with new hope and vision. The consensus was that little could be done to help the poorest people in the world. He says that has changed and that, "The Gates Foundation has made global health cool."

The Gates Foundation carries out the desires of Bill and Melinda to make every life count. They are particularly concerned about what TIME called, "The challenge of 'stupid poverty'--the people who die for want of a $2 pill because they live on $1 a day."

The Solution

The couple sees a "systems" problem in the world and, as engineers and business people, have set out to solve it.

At least once a year, Bill and Melinda take a "learning tour" of the backwaters of the world. There they meet with the poorest of the poor and see first-hand the lives that the neglected of the world live...from housing to food to education to the often miserable health conditions. From these visits they have pieced together their vision for a better world.

Admirers of the Gates applaud them for not seeking prizes or even friends through their charitable gifts. International health is bizarrely political, messy, difficult, and filled with failures. Bill Gates approaches these stubborn problems the same way he approached the computer field, with efficiency, hard-eyed clarity and a spreadsheet.

Besides tackling some of the world's worst problems, by insisting on efficiency and good business practices, the Gates have helped focus a laser beam on all nonprofit organizations, demanding that they operate in with an exacting accountability to their donors and the people they serve.

The Future

The unusual combination of Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates is working very well. Bono brings charisma, passion, and the ability to bring everyone into the cause. Bill and Melinda bring hard data, systems analysis, vision and the belief that money can create solutions. As TIME concluded:

"This is not about pity. It's more about passion. Pity sees suffering and wants to ease the pain; passion sees injustice and wants to settle the score. Pity implores the powerful to pay attention; passion warns them about what will happen if they don't. The risk of pity is that it kills with kindness; the promise of passion is that it builds on the hope that the poor are fully capable of helping themselves if given the chance. In 2005 the world's poor needed no more condolences; they needed people to get interested, get mad and then get to work."

The Gates Foundation is young...as are its founders. It is yet to be seen if it can bring sense to senseless conditions. But, Bill and Melinda have made a great start and the world will be watching.

Here is a list of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable causes:

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization
The Institute for OneWorld Health
Indian Ocean Earthquake
Children's Vaccine Program
Gates Millennium Scholars
Access to Learning Award
Gates Cambridge Scholarships
University Scholars Program
Computer History
Rice Research
Discovery Institute
University of Washington Department of Global Health