THIS is today's last post about the Gates Foundation. It is also the longest.
Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
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The way Gates and his elite staff have chosen to try to do so is by running their charity as a kind of business. Edwards calls this approach – increasingly popular at private foundations funded by business-people – philanthrocapitalism; others call it "venture philanthropy". Steiner explains: "Sitting here in Seattle, we're not going to solve Africa's problems. Africans are going to solve Africa's problems. We've got to find the Africans." Often, this means the foundation mounting competitions for grant applications, and giving money to the winners, which usually means the most "pioneering" (Steiner's word) and those that promise to fulfil a need not met by other charities.
Foundation staff describe this process, and indeed all their work, in business-school language: achieving "leverage", building the foundation "brand", serving "markets" and "customers". Or they use the language of management consultancy and computing: "Bill is about numbers," says Steiner. "He wants to see the data. He values data more than ideology."
Who says long form journalism is dead? In this brilliant article that would never be published by an American newspaper, the British political journalist Andy Beckett takes on the Gates Foundation. This article is a frontrunner for Gates Keepers' best Foundation coverage of the year award.
He is the ultimate geek done good: Bill Gates. Chairman of Microsoft, Master of the Universe, one of the richest men in the world, with a personal wealth of an estimated USD60bn.
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And then, I guess, Bill got bored. Or maybe just wanted to try out world domination another way – by being nice. In 2006, he announced that he would only work part-time at Microsoft, and full time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. By 2007, he and his wife had given an estimated USD27bn to charity. Like his Microsoft success, Bill Gates’ charitable activities are XXXL, too. By the end of last year, the charity had an endowment of USD33.5bn, and Warren Buffet as a trustee together with Bill and Melinda Gates. The foundation’s status as a charitable organisation requires it to donate at least 5% of its assets every year, i.e. at least around USD1.5n. Just to put this in perspective: The USD800m that the foundation spends under its health programme are roughly equivalent to the entire budget of the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO).
So, given that there’s much poverty, surely bigger is better? The Guardian recently published an interesting analysis titled ‘Inside the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ and this was one of the questions that the author pursued. The foundation has quickly become ubiquitous, thanks to both its generous finances and its star power: ‘’Every conference I go to, they're there. Every study that comes out, they're part of. They have the ear of any [national] leadership they want to speak to. Politicians attach themselves to Gates to get PR. Everyone loves to have a meeting with Gates. No institution would refuse," the author cites a charity professional.
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I was mulling this ‘venture philanthropy’ with the niggling feeling that I had overlooked something. Eventually, I realized what it was: That Bill Gates, a man clearly so talented in doing business, in earning money, decides that The Poor must be helped through charity.
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If the Gates Foundation prides itself on doing things a different way, it still does not challenge the aid industry as such: it gives grants to intermediary foundation, many of whom represent the business-as-usual of the aid industry and the illusion of the fixability of single issues. And charity is limited, as the article points out: ‘For all the charity's resources and connections, for all the attendant risks of over-confidence and over-mightiness, on the ground in Africa or Asia the foundation's immense-sounding grants are a miniscule fraction of what is required to create a fairer world.’ In contrast, a successful business has no such limit. Microsoft is everywhere. It pays taxes for governments to fund their own healthcare system. Employs people so that they can buy their own mediation. Really now, Bill – I had expected more!
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private philanthropy fund, sold off almost all of its pharmaceutical, biotechnology and health-care investments in the quarter ended June 30, according to a regulatory filing published Friday.
The Seattle-based charity endowment, set up by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and his wife, sold its total holding of 2.5 million shares in health-care giant Johnson & Johnson in the quarter, according to the filing.
According to this piece, the Gates Foundation unloaded basically all of its pharma and biotech stock holdings during the second quarter. Merck/Schering-Plough, J&J, Lilly, through Vertex and all the way to InterMune, Allos, and Auxilium - they held millions of shares of these, and it's all gone.
Cue the surrogates. First, they got a memorandum from Mike Cohen actively supporting the national standards. Two problems with the source: (1) Gates gives Achieve millions of dollars, so anything Achieve says on the topic should come with a truckload of salt, and (2) Achieve’s Board now includes none other than Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.
The Commish and the Secretary are also leaning on the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE). I like MBAE (and especially admire Linda Noonan, their executive director). In theory, if MBAE does a comparison of MA’s to the national standards on their own, that’s great. Welcome to the debate. But the MBAE analysis is directly funded by the Gates Foundation and the analysis is to be done by West Ed in San Francisco (and Woburn). Yup, Gates funds West Ed, too. An “objective,” “independent” analysis? Then the history of MBAE itself brings conflicts of interest. MBAE was co-founded by Secretary Reville; their former Board chair is Maura Banta, currently chair of the state’s Board of Ed (and someone who actively supported the inclusion of softer “how-to-skills” in our standards and assessments and now the adoption of weaker national standards). This is akin to being judge and jury in its own case.
I have no problem with Gates funding whatever they want. But the money merry-go-round gets dizzying (see here) when you think about the conflicts. No amount of salt is going to make this taste like cotton candy.
IBBLE VALLEY MP Nigel Evans and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons welcomed chairman of Microsoft Bill Gates.
Last May, Gates, Soros, Warren Buffett and David Rockefeller Jr, Rockefeller’s great-grandson, held a long private meeting in New York, not far from the UN, along with an assortment of media potentates such as Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Bloomberg. It was reported that Gates had been involved in summoning them all together and that the “Good Club,” as it supposedly called itself, discussed the world’s economic, environmental and health problems, the dangers of over-population and how rich people could better help poor people.
The Sunday Times quoted an unnamed participant at the meeting, who said that without anything “as crude as a vote” the gathering had agreed that the world’s problems “need big-brain answers ... independent of government.”
Bill Clinton and Bill Gates urged AIDS activists on Monday to squeeze value out of every cent of funds to fight HIV, saying they could not expect donors to give more in hard times unless it was carefully spent.
Very often their programme is too much directed by the Gates foundation and they don't consider enough the local situation.
Not only do we have to listen to Bill Gates, of all people, give a speech at the start of the International AIDS Conference, but we have to put up with speech previews. Double coverage. The Gates Foundation PR people are milking this one for all it is worth.
So are the Gates Foundation grants in HIV prevention efficient? Don't expect to hear from Bill on this one. There is almost nothing about prevention in this preview.
This takes the heat off Tachi.
--AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)