The headquarters of probably the most powerful charity in the world, and one of the most quietly influential international organizations of any sort, currently stand between a derelict restaurant and a row of elderly car repair businesses. Gentrification has yet to fully colonize this section of the Seattle waterfront, and even the actual premises of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, appropriately perhaps, used to be a check-processing plant, retain a certain workaday drabness. Only four stories high, with long rows of windows but no hint of corporate gloss, its beige and gray box sits anonymously in the drizzly northern Pacific light.
There is no sign outside the building. There is not even an entrance from the street. Instead, visitors must take a side road, stop at a separate gatehouse, also unmarked, and introduce themselves to a security guard, of the eerily polite and low-key kind employed by former heads of state and the extremely rich.
Once admitted, you cross a car park full of modest vehicles and, if you are lucky, glimpse one of the world-renowned health or poverty specialists working for the foundation, dressed in the confidently casual Seattle office uniform of chinos and waterproofs. Then you reach the reception: finally, there is a small foundation logo on the wall, and beside it a few lyrical photographs of children and farmers in much dustier and less prosperous places than Seattle. Only past the reception, almost hidden away on a landing, is there a reminder of the foundation’s status and contacts: a vivid shirt in a glass case, presented during a visit by former South African president Nelson Mandela.
The low-lit corridors beyond have little of the scruffiness and bustle you often find at charities. The fast-expanding foundation staff (presently around 850 employees) are in increasing demand around the world: meeting governments, attending summits and conferences and, above all, “in the field,” as foundation people put it, checking on the progress of the hundreds of projects — from drought-tolerant seeds to malaria vaccines to telephone banking for the developing world — to which the organization has given grants since it was founded in 1994.
In Seattle, maps of Africa and southern Asia, the foundation’s main areas of activity outside the US, are pinned up in the often empty, sparsely decorated offices and cubicles. There are also cuttings about the foundation’s work from the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, not publications you might have previously associated with a big interest in global disease and poverty. And lying on the foundation’s standard-issue, utilitarian desks, there are its confidently written and comprehensively illustrated reports: Ghana: An Overall Success Story is the title of one left in the unoccupied office I have been lent between interviews.
The foundation, in short, feels like a combination of a leftish think tank, an elite management consultancy and a hastily expanding Internet start-up. Is it the sort of institution that can really help the world’s poorest people?
For 14 of the last 16 years Bill Gates has been the richest person on Earth. More than a decade ago, he decided to start handing over the “large majority” of his wealth — currently more than US$54 billion — for the foundation to distribute, so that “the people with the most urgent needs and the fewest champions” in the world, as he and his wife Melinda put it on the foundation Web site, “grow up healthier, get a better education, and gain the power to lift themselves out of poverty.”
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