Gates and Buffett’s Push to Boost Giving Abroad Is Paying Dividends

The Atlantic recounts efforts by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to promote their philanthropic model among billionaires in other countries and cites recent evidence that U.S.-style giving is taking root abroad.

While Messrs. Gates and Buffett suffered some public rebuffs in early attempts to discuss giving with Chinese and Indian tycoons, Chinese e-commerce mogul Jack Ma’s recent creation of a $3-billion charitable trust and notable philanthropic commitments Mr. Gates secured last month in Vietnam and Indonesia “have injected new hope into the mission,” writes Benjamin Soskis, a philanthropy scholar at George Mason University.

Mr. Gates’s work to expand American-style philanthropy—”formalized, systematic, and professionalized giving done in the public eye”—is also fomenting valuable debates over different cultures’ giving models and “the relationship between philanthropy, income inequality, and democracy,” Mr. Soskis says. He suggests community foundations as another exportable model that “can help extend the prerogatives and privileges of the philanthropist to a larger group of men and women” worldwide.

The article is one of several in an Atlantic special report on philanthropy in America.