WP: Largess With Limits: Gates Foundation Takes Focused Approach to Giving

[DeepModem Mom]

Largess With Clear Limits
In Africa and Elsewhere, Gates Foundation Takes Focused Approach to Giving
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 23, 2006; Page A12

....The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world's richest charity, with resources that eventually will double to $60 billion because of a gift last month from famed investor Warren Buffett. The Gateses say they will also eventually give "the bulk" of the rest of their wealth, estimated at more than $40 billion, to the foundation. (Both Melinda Gates and Buffett are on the board of The Washington Post Co.)

Despite its unprecedented resources, the foundation tends to avoid the broad-based approach of traditional aid programs, putting relatively little money into such popular and immediate causes as job training, road building, schooling African children, easing famines or...improving housing.

Even in the sphere of global public health, the foundation's top focus, there are many things it avoids in favor of the development of potentially powerful new vaccines and drugs targeting the leading maladies in the poorest parts of the world.

Some of these are well-known -- AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis. Some are obscure -- Guinea worm, trypanosomiasis and cysticercosis, all parasitic diseases. But the more than $5 billion in grants devoted to global health so far reveal a striking faith in the transformative power of new technologies -- a fact perhaps not surprising for a foundation created by Bill Gates, who revolutionized the computing world with a company started in a dorm room.

In explaining why the foundation has not invested heavily in delivering lifesaving antiretroviral drugs for AIDS, for example, Melinda Gates said that only governments have enough money to provide such costly treatments....Officials point out that the foundation reflects Melinda Gates's personality at least as much as her husband's. The list of grants reveals a persistent attention to women's issues, with major spending on reproductive health and cervical cancer. The Gateses, on their recent visit, each singled out foundation-funded research into vaginal microbicides, which they hope will give women new power to protect themselves against AIDS, as key to curbing the epidemic....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072200760.html?sub=AR

[Nomad559]

1. Microsoft to Train More Than 45 Million People in Africa

http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=53570

Chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates has stated that affordable and accessible Information and Communications Technology is a critical key towards ensuring a vibrant future for developing countries and central to helping Africa achieve its Millennium Development Goals.

Mr Gates according to a release made available stated this in a key note address delivered at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum Africa 2006 in South Africa. He stated that, Microsoft hopes to deliver the benefits of ICT training to more than 45 million people in Africa by 2010 and help governments create sustainable economic growth.

He reiterated Microsoft's long-term approach to investment in Africa to include partnerships, together with Microsoft's existing Partners in Learning and Unlimited Potential education programmes and collaborations between Microsoft and local and global organizations like the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and the New Partnership for Africa's Development.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Thanks for adding this article, Nomad! nt

[lastknowngood]

3. They are not trying to solve problems they are looking for more

profit through producing more products and control more people. This not a charitable foundation it is extending capitalism under the guise of charity.

[alarimer]

4. And a nice tax break as well

Pardon me for being so cynical.