Tag: Bill Gates

Bill and Melinda Gates: More philanthropy can work against inequality

Since they launched their foundation in 2000, Bill and Melinda Gates have become America’s philanthropic golden couple — giving away more than $30 billion of their wealth and saving millions of lives in the process.

But their influence goes far beyond the work of their own foundation. The pair is credited with reinventing how philanthropy is done with their focus on concete measurable goals and consensus-building between foundations, businesses, development groups and governments.

In 2010, Bill Gates teamed up with his friend Warren Buffet to launch a campaign — called The Giving Pledge — to convince other super wealthy people around the world to give away at least 50 percent of their money to charity. There are now nearly 130 billionaires with a net worth of more than $700 billion who have signed the pledge.

This year, the Gateses are rallying other global citizens — ordinary people — to get involved in charity work.

“Having individuals stand up and say I care about the rest of the world, I care about these inequalities and I’m going to hold my government accountable for what they do — that’s what we’re hoping will happen,” Melinda Gates said in a joint interview with her husband earlier this year.

This interview, one in a series of conversations with tech figures who are shaking up philanthropy, has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: This year is your foundation’s 15th anniversary. When you reflect on all the work you’ve done, what are you most proud of?

Melinda: The work in vaccines and immunizations has really been transformative in bringing down childhood deaths. The two biggest killers of children are diarrhea and pneumonia. We now have new vaccines in those two areas that we’ve been involved in getting created, bringing the prices down and trying to get the lag time down. When we got into this work, the lag time in getting a vaccine from the United States to somewhere like Kenya was 20-25 years. That’s down now to one to three years. That’s something we’re in­cred­ibly proud of.

Saudi Prince pledges all his £20bn wealth to charities

Saudi businessman and philanthropist HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud has pledged to donate all his wealth to charities over the coming years. His $32 billion commitment is one of the largest philanthropic pledges to date.

Speaking as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Alwaleed Philanthropies Prince Alwaleed said that he wanted his gift to help build a “better world of tolerance, acceptance, equality and opportunity for all.”

A nephew to former king Abdullah, who died in January this year, Prince Alwaleed has been involved in philanthropic activities for 35 years. He has already donated $3.5 billion through the Alwaleed Philanthropies, one of the major philanthropic foundations in the Arab world.

He said:

“I now pledge to donate my entire wealth to the Alwaleed Philanthropies, which work in the main fields of intercultural understanding, supporting needy communities, through health promotion, eradication of diseases, provision of electric power to remote villages and hamlets, building orphanages and schools, and much more, as well as providing disaster relief and empowering women, youth and poverty alleviation. This donation will be allocated according to a well-devised plan throughout the coming years. It will be based on a strategy that is supervised and managed by a board of trustees headed by me to ensure that it will be used after my death for humanitarian projects and initiatives.”

Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with whom the Alwaleed Philanthropies have partnered, welcomed the Prince’s decision, saying:

“Prince Alwaleed’s generous commitment promises to significantly extend the great work that his foundation is already doing. His gift is an inspiration to all of us working in philanthropy around the world.”

Gates is one of those philanthropists who have signed up to The Giving Pledge, promising to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. Although Prince Alwaleed’s pledge is on that scale, his statement made no mention of that initiative.

The Alwaleed Philanthropies have supported projects in 92 countries. These include:

* promoting more sustainable communities in Saudi Arabia, through the Housing Initiative, which allows hundreds of thousands of eligible Saudi citizens to receive housing units.

* helping Afghani women by advocating literacy, via the Turquoise Mountain organisation

* supporting disaster relief in countries that have suffered natural disasters, including Egypt, Jeddah, Nepal and Turkey

* supporting education through six centres at the universities of Georgetown, Harvard, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo; in addition to the Islamic Hall at the Louvre in Paris.

Bill Gates and the 3-Story-High Philanthropic “Selfie”

Linsey McGoey wonders aloud in the Guardian whether philanthropy is better off once the major donor has died—or, as she puts it, “Is the most effective philanthropist a dead one?”

McGoey seems to believe that the celebrity status of some billionaire donors gets in the way of necessary critiques of their financially backed influence. She uses as an example of that blinding celebrity halo a bizarre scene that played out when Bill Gates turned 60.

To mark the occasion, more than 1,000 schoolchildren in Chennai, India, were photographed in the courtyard of their school holding life-sized cutouts of Gates’s face, raised above their heads in military salute. A three-story-high image of Gates beams from the rear of the configuration, featuring an upbeat slogan: “Grow rich. Help others.”

She contrasts this to the understated approach of the Wellcome Foundation which “creates about the same ‘good,’ measured in financial contributions, many members of the public haven’t even heard of it—let alone praise the charity in the same way that the Gates Foundation is lauded.”

“Most organizations on a par with the Gates Foundation are fair game for academic and journalistic investigation,” she writes:

When a health catastrophe strikes, many governments and UN organizations such as the World Health Organization are subjected to sustained internal and external review. The Gates Foundation, while as powerful, rarely faces the same scrutiny.

We need to challenge this silence. We need loudly to ask an uncomfortable question: do foundations narrow wealth inequalities or simply preserve them? Are foundations at their most radical when they exist to serve a benefactor’s hopes and whims—or when they’re emancipated from such an obligation?

McGooey generally believes that it is hard to be clearheaded about social inequities when that is the way that you, personally, have made your money. She posits that the “big three” U.S. foundations—Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie—only began to sympathize with labor and civil rights movements after their founders were dead, and that Ford’s grandson Henry actually resigned from the foundation in in 1977, writing that “a system that makes the foundation possible very probably is worth preserving.”—Ruth McCambridge