Melinda Gates doesn’t so much enter the room as take it by storm. She’s 10 minutes late for our interview, which, for someone who is known for her passion for efficiency, must be redressed. She sweeps through the door, sits herself on a chair, and launches straight in, speaking at speed like a horse race commentator, as though she is trying to outpace time itself and regain those lost minutes.
Though poised, and elegant to the last carefully set hair on her head, Gates has the air of someone permanently in a hurry. But then, wouldn’t you be, were you the wife of the world’s second richest man? (Bill Gates narrowly lost the No. 1 spot this year, according to Forbes magazine, to the Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim Helu). Wouldn’t you be in a rush if you knew that your personal Microsoft fortune, invested through the world’s largest private foundation, which bears your name, can change, or even save, the lives of millions around the world?
More specifically, she’s in a rush because she is preparing to travel from Seattle, where we meet at her headquarters, to New York to attend TEDxChange. She will deliver the keynote speech at the event tomorrow, a one-day blast pulled together by her philanthropic powerhouse, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, together with the fashionable ideas incubator TED. Given the tech-savviness of both parties, it’s no surprise that her speech will be simulcast to 74 groups across 36 countries — from Los Angeles to Nairobi’s Kibera slum.
The word that Melinda Gates wants to spread is that there is hope. Hope that the millennium development goals (MDG), the eight international targets laid down by the UN in 2000, can be met by the 2015 deadline. “I’d like people in the room to recognize we’ve made huge progress,” she says. “We’re not going to make them all, but government money has made an enormous difference.”
As an example, she points to MDG1, which, despite its less than snappy title, is fundamental: the eradication of extreme hunger and poverty. The world is on course to cut poverty in half by 2015, with 1.3 billion people already having clawed themselves out of it since 1990. “That’s a pretty amazing thing,” she says. “People hear the sad stories of what’s going on in Africa or India. They don’t hear that these investments we’re making as American or French or British citizens are actually working.”
The MDGs speak to the Gates’ belief in the transformative power of technology to deliver measurable improvements. Goals, deadlines, targets, percentages, number of lives impacted — these are part of the language of their evidence-based style of philanthropy.
Another topic that Melinda
Gates will be promoting, both at TEDxChange and next month’s
Living Proof road show in the UK, is child and women’s health. The figures are shocking. Almost 400,000 women die each year from complications during pregnancy or childbirth, yet these are the two UN-backed goals that are least likely to be met in five years’ time.
Gates’ focus on mother and child amounts to a significant shift for the foundation, which until this summer had an emphasis on vaccines. It
also points to a contrast in tone, in mind-set perhaps, between her and
her husband.
Bill Gates, as you might expect, is a binary thinker when it comes to spending money on good causes. What excites him is the power of innovation and science to effect certain and verifiable change, to find a cure, hence the foundation’s pledge earlier this year of US$10 billion to find new vaccines.
She is no less motivated by innovation; after all, she worked at Microsoft for nine years, which is how she met her future husband. But she brings something more amorphous to the project: the recognition that science is not enough, that unless technology engages with complex human needs, desires and interactions, then it will not take hold.
“You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can’t get her to come and get them then they won’t work. What are the dynamics that motivate her to do that? I’m interested in thinking about how we can change behavior,” she says.
The behavioral focus has much to do with her empathy for women as a mother of three children (aged 14, 11 and eight). But it may also be a reflection of the long journey she has made from her modest upbringing
in Texas to the US$125m mansion
in Seattle.
Her father, an engineer, was determined to see his four children through college, and set up a cleaning business to raise extra cash. As a teenager she scrubbed floors and scoured ovens to help out. “My parents were: ‘You will go to college! That is the way for economic opportunity in the US, no matter what you chose to do with your life.”
When years later the Gateses began to think about how to give back some of their largesse, she instinctively homed in on education, starting with a scheme to give out free laptops to schools.
An early push towards philanthropy came from Bill Gates’ late mother, Mary, who pulled no punches when she wrote to her future daughter-in-law before their 1994 wedding. “From those to whom much is given, much is expected,” she said.
“In a funny way I think Mary could see ahead where we might be going,” Melinda Gates says. “I was young when I married Bill, 29. He was so committed to working at Microsoft and she kept pressing him to do more giving. ‘Mom, I’m busy at Microsoft, I’m trying to change the world that way,’ he’d say. But she knew at some point that our place in life would be to give it back.”
The second big impetus towards helping the developing world also came around the time of the wedding, when the couple made their first
trip to Africa. They took a group
of friends on safari for a three-week engagement celebration. What
began as a manifestation of supreme
wealth inspired years spent in philanthropic endeavor.
“I loved the animals and I loved the landscape, but at the end of the day you came back saying: ‘My gosh! What’s going on here? How could I live a life like this in Seattle with such a large dichotomy between human beings. That just shouldn’t be.’
“We were driving down the road in what was then Zaire in our smart Jeeps and all the shops were shut down. The women had no shoes and were carrying huge bundles of sticks on their heads with a baby in front and on their back. It was so different, you were almost assaulted by it, in a way that made you want to know more. So we went out into the villages, to understand, and the more we learned the more we wanted to do something to help.”
Since 1994 the Gates foundation has committed US$23 billion. In 2006 it received a massive injection of funds from financier Warren Buffett, the couple’s good friend. The foundation’s endowment now stands at US$33 billion.
The figures are staggering, and multiplying. Last month the trio announced they had persuaded 40 or so other American billionaires to follow their example and promise to give away at least half their pots of gold to charity.
The billionaires club, or the “giving pledge,” as Gates prefers to call it, is predictably a very male affair, including the likes of the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, Star Wars creator, George Lucas, old money in the form of David Rockefeller and oil wealth personified by T Boone Pickens. Does Gates finds the testosterone-heavy atmosphere of their occasional gatherings oppressive?
“Not really. When we’ve done these dinners the wives are present too. You can’t underestimate how much the wives are part of the decision-making.”
Unlike many of the other wives, though, Melinda Gates has played a full and equal part in running the Gates foundation from the start. There is nothing figurative about her.
“You have to remember my background was computer science, and when I went through that at Duke [University] and then started at Microsoft there weren’t that many women around. So I’ve been pretty used to that for a long time. The great thing here at the foundation is that Bill and I are peers, we do things together.”
Between them, the billionaires are offering to give away US$125 billion. But the venture also carries with it a risk. By drawing attention to themselves, to the huge donations they propose but also to their fabulous individual wealth, the participants are inviting greater scrutiny and even backlash to the growing phenomenon of what has been called “philanthrocapitalism.”
The Gates’ foundation, swollen now to about 870 employees, has been questioned for its impact on public sector development projects. The charity is so powerful, so lit up, that it can act as a beacon, attracting the best scientists and taking them away from the poor countries where they are needed most.
Gates says she is well aware of the danger. “Yes sometimes the best and the brightest want to come to work for us, but we want to train and leave a great footprint out in the field. There are some great researchers we are super-deeply involved with in India and I want them exactly where they are: in India.
“Our role is to be catalytic, and all the work we do has to be in partnership. When it comes to polio or malaria or agriculture, we are a drop in the bucket compared with the scale of the problems. We can take some of the risk out of the equation by doing pilot projects, funding research, convening partners who wouldn’t normally come together, but long term it’s really the government funding that counts.”
Critics have pointed out that massive giving from Gates and others comes against the backdrop of unprecedented inequality in the US. In the 1970s the richest 1 percent owned a 10th of the country’s income; now it owns almost a quarter.
I put this argument to Gates: that she and her friends in the billionaires club are giving with one hand what they’ve taken with the other. “You have to let capitalism work the way it works. I don’t think you want to make a fundamental change to capitalism. It would be different if we were taking all the wealth we had and, as Warren says, building pyramids to ourselves. We are not.”
Philosophically, there’s the playing God conundrum. To simplify, critics wonder why rich people — who may be brilliant at computer programming, say, but have never had to answer to the electorate — should have the right to decide who gets help and who doesn’t.
“Ultimately we are accountable to society,” says Melinda Gates. “Thank goodness we have a free press in the US and around the world. The criticisms that have come for the foundation, honestly, they benefit us.
“Bill and I aren’t sitting here in a black box saying, ‘OK, save that life in Africa and not this one in the US.’ We are trying to be informed by lots of people around the globe.”
That still leaves me pondering on a personal, as opposed to political, level how odd it must be to be Melinda Gates. To know that by wielding her own checkbook she can change the world.
“I don’t think of it that way, I really don’t,” she says, hurtling towards the end of our conversation. “When I’m in India or Bangladesh or one of the many countries I’ve been to in Africa, I try very hard to put myself into the shoes of that woman. I’m constantly saying to myself, I’m lucky I was born in the US. Leave aside Bill and the wealth, lucky to be in the US. So if I was that woman in that country, what would I do to lift myself up?”
BY KATE ABBOTT THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
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