0128adicate polio, with the same drive he brought to Microsoft .
William Henry “Bill” Gates is a rich man. His estimated wealth, some
65 billion measured in US dollars, equals the annual GDP of Ecuador,
and maybe a bit more than that of Croatia. By this rather crude
criterion, the founder of Microsoft is worth two Kenyas, three Trinidads
and a dozen or so Montenegros. Not bad for a university dropout.
Gates is also mortal, although some of his admirers may find that
hard to believe, and as they say, there are no pockets in shrouds. So he
is now engaged in the process of ridding himself of all that money in
the hope of extending the lives of others less fortunate than himself.
“I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes,” he
says, redundantly. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
Its utility is entirely in building an organisation and getting the
resources out to the poorest in the world.”
That “certain point” is set a little higher than for the rest of us –
Gates owns a lakeside estate in Washington State worth about
$150 million (£94 million) and boasting a swimming pool equipped with
an underwater music system – but one gets the point. Being rich, even on
the cosmic scale attained by Bill Gates, is no guarantee of an enduring
place in history. The projection of the personal computer into daily
life should do the trick for him, but even at the age of 57 he is a
restless man and wants something more. The “more” is the eradication of a
disease that has blighted untold numbers of lives: polio.
Later this month, Gates will deliver the
BBC’s Dimbleby Lecture, taking as his theme the value of the young human
being. Every child, he will say, has the right to a healthy and
productive life, and he will explain how technology and innovation can
help towards the attainment of that still-distant goal. Gates has put
his money where his mouth is. He and his wife Melinda have so far given
away $28 billion via their charitable foundation, more than $8 billion
of it to improve global health.
“My wife and I had a long dialogue about
how we were going to take the wealth that we’re lucky enough to have and
give it back in a way that’s most impactful to the world,” he says.
“Both of us worked at Microsoft and saw that if you take innovation and
smart people, the ability to measure what’s working, that you can pull
together some pretty dramatic things.
“We’re focused on the help of the poorest
in the world, which really drives you into vaccination. You can
actually take a disease and get rid of it altogether, like we are doing
with polio.”
This has been done only once before in humans, with the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s.
“Polio’s pretty special because once you
get an eradication you no longer have to spend money on it; it’s just
there as a gift for the rest of time.”
One can see why that appeals to Gates. He
has always sought neat, definitive solutions to things, but as he knows
from Microsoft, bugs are resilient things. The disease is still endemic
in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and killing it off altogether has
been likened to squeezing jelly to death. There is another, sinister
obstacle: the propagation by Islamist groups of the belief that polio
vaccination is a front for covert sterilisation and other western evils.
Health workers in Pakistan have paid with their lives for involvement
in the programme.
“It’s not going to stop us succeeding,”
says Gates. “It does force us to sit down with the Pakistan government
to renew their commitments, see what they’re going to do in security and
make changes to protect the women who are doing God’s work and getting
out to these children and delivering the vaccine.”
Gates does not usually speak in religious
terms, and has traditionally danced around the issue of God. His wife, a
Roman Catholic, is less defensive on that topic but ploughs her own
furrow, encouraging contraception when necessary, in contradiction to
teaching from Rome.
“Melinda and I had been talking about
this even before we were married,” he says. “When I was in my 40s
Microsoft was my primary activity. The big switch for me was when I
decided to make the foundation my primary purpose. It was a big change,
although there are more in common with the two things than you might
think – meeting with scientists, taking on tough challenges, people
being sceptical that you can get things done.”
Gates is still chairman of Microsoft but
without his day-to-day attention it has taken on the appearance of a
weary giant, trailing Apple and Google in innovation. Some have called
for Gates’s return to the company full-time to inject some verve but he
isn’t coming back.
“My full-time work for the rest of my
life will be at the foundation,” he says. “I still work part-time for
Microsoft. I’ve had two careers and I’m lucky that both of them have
been quite amazing.
“I loved my Microsoft: it prepared me for
what I’m doing now. In the same way that I got to see the PC and
internet revolutions, now I see child death rates coming down. I work
very long hours and try to learn as much as I can about these things,
but that’s because I enjoy it.”
He emphasises that the foundation’s effort is part of a global campaign in which governments must play the lead role.
“The scale of the (foundation’s) wealth
compared to government budgets is actually not that large, and compared
to the scale of some of these problems. But I do feel lucky that
substantial resources are going back to make the world a more habitable
place.”
In 1990 some 12 million children under
the age of five died. The figure today is about seven million, or 19,000
per day. According to the United Nations, the leading causes of death
are pneumonia (18 per cent), pre-birth complications (14 per cent),
diarrhoea (11 per cent), complications during birth (nine per cent) and
malaria (seven per cent). For Gates, though, polio is a totem. The
abolition of the disease will be a headline-grabber, spurring countries
on to greater efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend
$1.8 billion in the next six years to accomplish that goal, almost a
third of the global effort.
“All you need is over 90 per cent of
children to have the vaccine drop three times and the disease stops
spreading. The number of cases eventually goes to zero. When we started,
we had over 400,000 children a year being paralysed and we are now down
to under 1,000 cases a year. The great thing about finishing polio is
that we’ll have resources to get going on malaria and measles.”
Gates is no saint. He could be an
intimidating boss at Microsoft and his company became notorious for
using its clout to reinforce its dominance in the market place, at the
expense of smaller rivals. Still, he and his wife are showing generosity
on a staggering scale, a counterblast to the endemic greed of the
Nineties and early Noughties, and they have convinced others that
mega-philanthropy is the way of the future. That wily investor, Warren
Buffett, has so far given away $17.5 billion via the Gates Foundation.
The children of Bill and Melinda Gates
will never know poverty. They may not become multibillionaires but even
the loss to charity of the vast bulk of their parents’ fortune should
leave them with a billion or so each.
Gates explains: “The vast majority of the
wealth, over 95 per cent, goes to the foundation, which will spend all
that money within 20 years after neither of us are around any more.”
So, is it about some new-found faith, all this giving?
“It doesn’t relate to any particular
religion; it’s about human dignity and equality,” he says. “The golden
rule that all lives have equal value and we should treat people as we
would like to be treated.”
Source:
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment