Tag: india

Saudi Prince Says He Will Donate $32 Billion To Charity

Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, an investor and business magnate who is also a member of the Saudi royal family, announced Wednesday that he will donate all of his $32 billion fortune to charity in the coming years.

“It is a commitment without boundaries. A commitment to all humankind,” Alwaleed, 60, said in a press release announcing his intentions.

Alwaleed, who holds degrees from Menlo College and Syracuse University, is CEO of the Saudi investment conglomerate Kingdom Holding Company and has large stakes in Citigroup, Apple, Twitter, General Motors, 21st Century Fox, Euro Disney and other companies. He also heads Alwaleed Philanthropies, which has already donated $3.5 billion to charity.

The $32 billion commitment will reportedly be funneled to Alwaleed Philanthropies to be used for a wide variety of causes, including intercultural understanding, disease and poverty eradication, rural electrification, empowering women and disaster relief. The prince and his team will develop a “well-devised plan” to allocate the gift, Alwaleed said.

“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,” he said. He said philanthropy is an intrinsic part of his Islamic faith.

Gender, race or religious affiliation will not factor into which humanitarian issues are addressed, the announcement stated.

Alwaleed is part of the Saudi royal family, but he does not hold an official position in the government. He gives frank interviews on political matters and employs many women in his organization, according to The New York Times, contributing to his image as an outsider.

He settled a libel lawsuit against Forbes magazine group last month after claiming that the magazine’s $20 billion estimate of his net worth was undervalued. Forbes now lists Alwaleed’s net worth as $28.1 billion, several billion shy of his $32 billion pledge, and ranks him as the 34th richest person in the world.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Alwaleed offered $10 million to a charity for families of uniformed workers killed in the terrorist attacks. But then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected the money because of a press release accompanying the gift that explicitly criticized Israel and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. “At times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack,” the statement, attributed to the prince, read. “Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.”

After Guiliani rejected the funds, the prince told a Saudi newspaper, “The whole issue is that I spoke about their position [on the Middle East conflict] and they didn’t like it because there are Jewish pressures and they were afraid of them.”

Bill Gates’ Foundation Gives Its Largest Gift Ever To Combat Ebola Crisis

The fight against Ebola has found a deep-pocketed ally in Bill Gates.

The billionaire philanthropist’s foundation has pledged $50 million to fight the viral outbreak in West Africa, according to a statement by the organization. The Associated Press noted the donation is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s largest ever toward a humanitarian cause.

The foundation’s statement specified funds would immediately benefit United Nations agencies and international organizations involved in containing and treating the virus, allowing them to purchase necessary medical supplies and increase emergency operations. From the foundation’s total pledge, $5 million has already gone toward the World Health Organization (WHO), while another $5 million has been allocated for UNICEF efforts in some of the hardest hit regions of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The historic pledge comes a week after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said “the world can no longer afford to short-change global public health,” urging international organizations to help WHO raise the approximate $600 million needed for supplies in West Africa.

In a report released Sept. 5, WHO reported the overall death rate of the disease stood at 53 percent. The total number of cases reached 3,944, while 2,079 had died from infection in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — countries identified as “those with widespread and intense transmission.”

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