What Does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Do? |
Posted: February 15, 2016 |
There no doubting that William Henry “Bill” Gates is a wealthy man. In US dollars, his estimated wealth, which stands at around 65 billion, is equal to the entire GDP of Ecuador. And that’s not at all bad going for someone who dropped out of university. Bill Gates is also human, though many of his admirers find it difficult to believe. He claims that money has little utility worth to him other than to a certain point. The utility worth is in the building of an organization and then ensuring that the resources are delivered to the world’s poorest. Even at 57 years of age, Gates continues to be a restless man, always wanting for something that bit more. And this particular “more” is the extinction of a disease which has managed to blight so many lives: Polio. But although Gates and wife Melinda do talk the talk, they most certainly, likewise, also walk the walk, having already given away over $30 billion through their charitable foundation, and almost $10 billion of that charity is earmarked for the improvement of global health. He said that through his experience with Microsoft, if innovation is added together with smart people, then you have the capacity to measure that it is that’s working. And then you can use this to make some very dramatic changes, even on a global scale. Himself and Melinda are focused on helping the world’s poorest, which in turn means that much of what they do is to turn the spotlight on a particular disease, find a vaccination, then get rid of the disease altogether, such as they are doing with polio. It’s a concept that has only been successfully accomplished before in humans, when smallpox was eradicated in the 1970s. Gates says that polio is a little different to many global diseases, since once there’s a vaccination, there’s no longer a need to invest further money in bettering it. And that seems appropriate. After all, he’s always been the kind of person to have sought definitive and neat solutions to things, though, as he’s fully aware through his workings with Microsoft, bugs are frequently resilient pests. Polio is still endemic in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, and expunging it entirely is nigh-on impossible. What’s more, there’s a further, sinister obstacle. And that is the propagation of the belief of a vaccination for polio is merely a frontage for covert sterilization and various alternative Western evils by none other than Islamist fundamentalists. But Gates propounds that nothing will stop their success, and all this does is serve to renew their commitment by working closely with the governments in the aforementioned countries.
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