The Gates answer ‘tough questions’ about foundation

We are outspoken about our optimism. These days, though, optimism seems to be in short supply. The headlines are filled with awful news. Every day brings a different story of political division, violence, or natural disaster. Despite the headlines, we see a world that’s getting better.

This is our 10th Annual Letter, and we’re marking the occasion by answering 10 tough questions that people ask us. We will answer them as forthrightly as we can, and we hope that when you’re finished reading, you’ll be just as optimistic as we are.

Tough Question #1: Why don’t you give more in the United States?

Melinda: Our foundation spends about $500 million a year in the United States, most of it on education. That’s a lot, but it is less than the roughly $4 billion we spend to help developing countries.

We don’t compare different people’s suffering. All suffering is a terrible tragedy. We do, however, assess our ability to help prevent different kinds of suffering. When we studied the global health landscape, we realised that our resources could have a disproportionate impact. We knew we could help save literally millions of lives. So that’s what we’ve tried to do.

Bill: We’ve been looking at how we might expand our work in the US beyond education. We fund the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, which is studying ways to help people move up the economic ladder. Although we travel extensively to learn about the lives of poor people in other countries, we’ve done less of that in America.

Tough Question #2: What do you have to show for the billions you’ve spent on US education?

Bill: A lot, but not as much as either of us would like. We made education the focus of our work in the United States because it is the key to a prosperous future, for individuals and the country.

We support early learning and postsecondary institutions, but we started with high schools, and that’s still the area in which we invest the most. We’ve learned a lot about what works in education, but the challenge has been to replicate the successes widely.

Melinda: We recently announced some changes in our education work that take these lessons into account. Everything we do in education begins as an idea that educators bring to us. They’re the ones who live and breathe this work, who have dedicated their careers to improving systems that are failing many students today, especially minority students.

Tough Question #3: Why don’t you give money to fight climate change?

Bill: We do! Some of it involves our foundation, and some of it involves our own personal investments. Personally, we’re investing in innovations that will cut back on greenhouse gases (what’s called climate-change mitigation). The world needs new sources of reliable, affordable clean energy, but it has been dramatically underfunding the research that would produce these breakthroughs.

Melinda: We invest to help farmers be more productive, so that they’ll have more buffer to withstand lean years when they come. We also invest in climate-smart crops that are less susceptible to extreme heat and cold, drought and flooding, and diseases and pests.

Tough Question #4: Are you imposing your values on other cultures?

Bill: On one level, I think the answer is obviously no. The idea that children shouldn’t die of malaria or be malnourished is not just our value. It’s a human value. Parents in every culture want their children to survive and thrive.

Melinda: We’re acutely aware that some development programmes in the past were led by people who assumed they knew better than the people they were trying to help. We’ve learned over the years that listening and understanding people’s needs from their perspective is not only more respectful—it’s also more effective.

Tough Question #5: Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation?

Melinda: Saving the lives of children is its own justification. It also has the potential to improve life for everyone. But this demographic transition can happen in a reasonable period of time only if all women have access to contraceptives. Right now, more than 200 million don’t. For the sake of those women, their children, and their communities, we must meet their needs—and we must do it now. If we deny access, we are dooming them to a lifetime of poverty. But if we invest in providing access, families will use it to lift themselves out of poverty and build a better future for their children.

Tough Question #6: How are President Trump’s policies affecting your foundation’s work?

Bill: More broadly, the America First worldview concerns me. It’s not that the United States shouldn’t look out for its people. The question is how best to do that. My view is that engaging with the world has proven over time to benefit everyone, including Americans, more than withdrawing does. Even if we measured everything the government did only by how much it helped American citizens, global engagement would still be a smart investment.

Tough Question #7: Why do you work with corporations?

Melinda: We work with companies like GSK and Johnson & Johnson because they can do things no one else can. Take the example of developing new diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines for diseases of poverty. The basic science that underlies product development happens at research centers and universities. But when the goal is to build upon basic science, translate it into products that save lives, get those products tested and approved, and then manufacture those products, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies have the vast majority of the necessary expertise. Every partner we work with is required to make products developed with foundation funding widely available at an affordable price.

Ideally, we’d like companies to seek out more opportunities to meet the needs of people in developing countries. If our limited partnerships encourage them to see potential in new markets, we’d consider it a big success.

Tough Question #8: Is it fair that you have so much influence?

Melinda: No. It’s not fair that we have so much wealth when billions of others have so little. And it’s not fair that our wealth opens doors that are closed to most people. World leaders tend to take our phone calls and seriously consider what we have to say. Cash-strapped school districts are more likely to divert money and talent toward ideas they think we will fund.

But there is nothing secret about our objectives as a foundation. We are committed to being open about what we fund and what the results have been. (It’s not always immediately clear what’s been successful and what hasn’t, but we work hard to assess our impact, course correct, and share lessons.) We do this work, and use whatever influence we have, to help as many people as possible and to advance equity around the world. Although we’ve had some success, I think it would be hard to argue at this point that we made the world focus too much on health, education, or poverty.

Bill: As much as we try to encourage feedback, we know that some of our critics don’t speak up because they don’t want to risk losing money. That means we need to hire well, consult experts, learn constantly, and seek out different viewpoints.

Tough Question #9: What happens when the two of you disagree?

Melinda: We never disagree. Just kidding. Bill almost never gets this question. I get it all the time. Sometimes, it’s from journalists hinting that Bill must be the one making the decisions. Other times, it’s from women philanthropists asking advice about how to work more effectively with their husbands.

Bill and I have two things going in our favour.

First, we agree on basic values. For our wedding, Bill’s parents gave us a sculpture of two birds side by side, staring at the horizon, and it’s still in front of our house. I think of it all the time, because fundamentally we’re looking in the same direction.

Second, Bill is very open-minded, which isn’t necessarily how people perceive him. I love Bill because he has a kind heart, listens to other people, and lets himself be moved by what they say. When I tell a story about what I’ve seen, he feels it. He might ask me to gather some data for good measure, but he doesn’t doubt the reality of my experiences or the soundness of my judgment.

Tough Question #10: Why are you really giving your money away—what’s in it for you?

Bill: It’s not because we think about how we’ll be remembered. We would be delighted if someday diseases like polio and malaria are a distant memory, and the fact that we worked on them is too.

There are two reasons to do something like this. One is that it’s meaningful work. Even before we got married, we talked about how we would eventually spend a lot of time on philanthropy. We think that’s a basic responsibility of anyone with a lot of money. Once you’ve taken care of yourself and your children, the best use of extra wealth is to give it back to society.

The other reason is that we have fun doing it. Both of us love digging into the science behind our work. At Microsoft, I got deep into computer science. At the foundation, it’s computer science plus biology, chemistry, agronomy, and more. I’ll spend hours talking to a crop researcher or an HIV expert, and then I’ll go home, dying to tell Melinda what I’ve learned.

It’s rare to have a job where you get to have both a big impact and a lot of fun. I had it with Microsoft, and I have it with the foundation. I can’t imagine a better way to spend the bulk of my time.

Talking about malaria at the Bagamoyo District Hospital in Tanzania.

Melinda: We both come from families that believed in leaving the world better than you found it. My parents made sure my siblings and I took the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church to heart. Bill’s mom was known, and his dad still is known, for showing up to advocate for a dizzying number of important causes and support more local organizations than you can count.

When we got to know Warren Buffett, we discovered that he was steeped in those same values, even though he grew up in a different place and at a different time. When Warren entrusted us with giving away a large portion of his wealth, we redoubled our efforts to live up to the values we share.

Of course, these values are not unique to the three of us. Millions of people give back by volunteering their time and donating money to help others. We are, however, in the more unusual position of having a lot of money to donate. Our goal is to do what our parents taught us and do our part to make the world better.

Bill and I have been doing this work, more or less full-time, for 18 years. That’s the majority of our marriage. It’s almost the entirety of our children’s lives. By now the foundation’s work has become inseparable from who we are. We do the work because it’s our life.

We’ve tried to pass on values to our children by talking with them about the foundation’s work, and, as they’ve gotten older, taking them with us on trips so they can see it for themselves. We’ve connected to each other through thousands of daily debriefs on learning sessions, site visits, and strategy meetings. Where we go, who we spend our time with, what we read and watch and listen to—these decisions are made through the prism of our work at the foundation (when we’re not watching The Crown).

Maybe 20 years ago, we could have made a different choice about what to do with our wealth. But now it’s impossible to imagine. If we’d decided to live a different life then, we wouldn’t be us now. This is who we chose to be.