That surprising thing Bill Gates said
Bill Gates is an indisputable king of philanthropy, so much so that his private money has the power to draw public funding along with it. Whether it is because the amounts he donates are so large or because people assume his brilliance in technology bleeds into all other areas — or a combination of both – he has had an unprecedented influence on the areas of health and education around the world. That’s why it is important to pay attention to what he has to say about how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s initiatives are working.
Late last month, the Seattle Times published a story that recounted a speech that Gates gave last fall about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s extraordinary “Grand Challenges” project, in which billions of research dollar have been awarded in at least 80 countries to research improve health and development to the neediest. The story says that rather than giving a boastful speech, Gates, used the word “naive” four times in describing the expectations he and his foundation had for the initiative. It says in part:
The Microsoft co-founder seemed humbled that, despite an investment of $1 billion, none of the projects funded under the Gates Foundation’s “Grand Challenges” banner has yet made a significant contribution to saving lives and improving health in the developing world.
What happened?
For one thing, Gates said, he was “pretty naive about how long that process would take.” Success wasn’t coming as fast as he had calculated, a result in part by a miscalculation about how the projects he funded would work on the ground. A Web site called humanosphere.org had written about the speech earlier and and noted that critics of the project, while acknowledging the enormity and good intentions of Gates’ philanthropy, have said that many of these projects have relied on solving problems rooted in poverty and disease with technology rather than addressing relevant social and political issues. The story says in part:
The foundation’s metrics for assessing success or failure within the Grand Challenges program have not been made public. But after a decade and nearly a billion dollars spent on more than 1500 projects aimed at solving the philanthropy’s select Grand Challenges, not a single project has been judged a Grand Slam, or even a home run.“We were naive about how specific we had to be about costs and ease of delivery,” Gates said. One of the biggest ‘learnings’ (another word, or not, he likes to use) is that just funding scientists and innovators to explore far-fetched but promising ideas is not sufficient, he said. Going forward, Gates told the crowd, they will be requiring most innovators requesting a grant to partner with manufacturers, biomedical companies or others with expertise in product development before they’ll fund a project.“We vastly underestimated how important that is,” Gates said.
These are not minor admissions.
After health, his second biggest grant-making target is education. Here, too, he has made some important admissions about his expectations for success and the actual track record, after pumping billions of dollars That surprising thing Bill Gates said - The Washington Post:
