‘The New Yorker’: Gates Foundation

PRESS CLIPPINGS

Overstating the impact of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is nearly impossible, writes The New Yorker magazine (October 24) in a review of the work of the Seattle philanthropy.

“The research programs of entire countries have been restored, and fields that had languished for years, like tropical medicine, have once again burst to life,” the magazine says, in large part because of the Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates says that when he started the foundation, one of his biggest surprises was that grant makers had not yet tackled some of the problems that could be solved, or at least remedied, with a major philanthropic investment. In particular, he and his wife, Melinda, looked at diseases that were killing millions of people in the developing world.

“The whole thing was stunning to us,” Mr. Gates told the magazine. “We couldn’t even believe it. You think in philanthropy that your dollars will just be marginal, because the really juicy obvious things will all have been taken. So you look at this stuff, and we are, like, wow! When somebody is saying to you we can save many lives for hundreds of dollars each, the answer has to be no, no, no. That would already have been done.”

He added: “We go to events where people are raising money for various illnesses where lives are being treated as if they were worth many millions of dollars. And here we were learning that you can save even more lives for a few hundred each. We really did think it was too shocking to be true.”

Although the foundation, with nearly $29-billion in assets — more than the gross domestic product of Tanzania, the magazine notes — is influential because of its size, Bill Gates does not consider the foundation successful just because it gives away a lot of money.

“We do not measure ourselves at all by the amount given,” he says. “We have taken on the top 20 killers, and for everything we do we look at the cost per life saved and real outcomes in terms of how things get improved.”