How Much is Enough? by Arun Abey

Author:Arun Abey [Abey, Arun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60832-149-0
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Published: 2007-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE $30 BILLION MAN

When Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates read an article about diseases in the developing world, he learned that every year, malaria kills a million people, most of them children in Africa under the age of five.

Gates decided to find out more. But the more he read, the less he liked what he learned. He found out that millions of children were also dying each year from other diseases that had been eliminated years ago in the United States. Tuberculosis, for instance, remained endemic in the developing world. Some diseases, such as rotavirus, he had never even heard of.

Until reading about these diseases Gates and his wife, Melinda, had assumed that governments were doing everything they could to get vaccines and treatments to people who desperately needed them. But what they discovered shocked them.

“We couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that in our world today some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not,” Gates said in an address to the World Health Assembly in Geneva in 2005.

Gates, then the world’s richest person, decided to do something about it. He and his wife are now in the process of donating tens of billions of dollars of their personal wealth to organizations that are addressing some of the world’s most intractable health problems.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a bigger welfare program than many governments. With more than $30 billion in its coffers, it is addressing problems ranging from the global malaria and AIDS epidemics to public libraries and the United States high school system, which Gates calls “obsolete.”

It now funds more than one-third of global malaria research. Scientists working for it have been able to manufacture the most effective drug to treat the disease, previously in short supply. The cost to save a life is expected to fall from $2.40 to 25 cents per dose.

Some cynics may think that Gates is merely seeking to preserve his name, or that this is the least someone with tens of billions of dollars can do for the world. The important thing, though, is that what is inspiring Gates is a genuine sense of injustice and desire to make a difference. How many of the world’s wealthy people, including the middle classes of the developed world, would consider giving away more than one-third of their wealth to improve the lives of strangers?

What values underpin the causes that the foundation has chosen to support? Understanding their approach to this question is interesting for anyone considering philanthropy, even if our budgets are only a small fraction of the Gates’s.

The foundation decided to focus its initial efforts on where it believed it could make the biggest difference to people’s lives. The current focus on global health and the American high school system enables it to learn about the best approaches in each area and thus to have the greatest possible impact, its founders say. Says Gates:

Every day, more than 1,000 children die because they didn’t get a 15-cent measles vaccine. Almost 3 billion people around the world live on less than $2 per day.

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