Monday, July 12, 2010

Spending a few days at the Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the biggest philanthropic group in the world, the second largest isn't even close. The size of the Gates Foundation worries many who watch philanthropic efforts. The critics worry that it's sheer size can dominate the development agenda worldwide, and could bring pet projects to the fore even though another needs might be more urgent.

From the Guardian, writer Andy Beckett spent a few days within the Foundation.

For 14 of the last 16 years Bill Gates has been the richest person on earth. More than a decade ago, he decided to start handing over the "large majority" of his wealth – currently £36bn – for the foundation to distribute, so that "the people with the most urgent needs and the fewest champions" in the world, as he and his wife Melinda put it on the foundation website, "grow up healthier, get a better education, and gain the power to lift themselves out of poverty". In 2006, Warren Buffett, currently the third richest person in the world, announced that he too would give a large proportion of his assets to the foundation. Its latest accounts show an endowment of £24bn, making it the world's largest private foundation. It is committed to spending the entire endowment within 50 years of Bill and Melinda Gates's deaths. Last year it awarded grants totalling £2bn.

As well as its money, it is the organisation's optimism and the fame of its main funder – in 2008 Bill Gates stopped working full-time for his computer giant Microsoft to concentrate on the foundation – that has given it momentum. Last May an editorial in the revered medical journal the Lancet praised it for giving "a massive boost to global health funding . . . The Foundation has challenged the world to think big and to be more ambitious about what can be done to save lives in low-income settings. The Foundation has added renewed dynamism, credibility, and attractiveness to global health [as a cause]."

Precise effects of big charity projects can be hard to measure, especially over a relatively short period. But already two bodies that the foundation funds heavily, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, have, according to the foundation, delivered vaccines to more than 250 million children in poor countries and prevented more than an estimated five million deaths.

"The foundation has brought a new vigour," says Michael Edwards, a veteran charity commentator and usually a critic of billionaire philanthropists. "The charity sector can almost disempower itself; be too gloomy about things . . . Gates offers more of a positive story. He is a role model for other philanthropists, and he is the biggest."

"Everyone follows the Gates foundation's lead," says someone at a longer-established charity who prefers not to be named. "It feels like they're everywhere. 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 foundation has branch offices in Washington DC, Delhi and Beijing. This year, it opened an office in London, not in one of the scruffy inner suburbs usually inhabited by charities, but close to the Houses of Parliament.

Seth Berkley, head of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative [IAVI], says: "The foundation has the advantage of speed and flexibility. When they want to, they can move quickly, unlike many other large bureaucracies. Most of the other private foundations in the US don't work globally. Others are more staid than Gates. I used to work at the Rockefeller Foundation [an older American charity] and dole out grants in small amounts. The Gates foundation gave us at IAVI a grant of $1.5m (£1m), then $25m. Then they gave us a line of credit – which is extremely unusual in grant-making – of $100m, to give us assets to be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and initiate vaccine development programmes. Using that $100m, we were able to leverage lots more funding – $800m in total. What Gates allowed us to do was go out and search for new ideas and move quickly on them. The old way was to find the new ideas, and then look for a donor to back them."

"Everyone follows the Gates foundation's lead," says someone at a longer-established charity who prefers not to be named. "It feels like they're everywhere. 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 foundation has branch offices in Washington DC, Delhi and Beijing. This year, it opened an office in London, not in one of the scruffy inner suburbs usually inhabited by charities, but close to the Houses of Parliament.

Seth Berkley, head of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative [IAVI], says: "The foundation has the advantage of speed and flexibility. When they want to, they can move quickly, unlike many other large bureaucracies. Most of the other private foundations in the US don't work globally. Others are more staid than Gates. I used to work at the Rockefeller Foundation [an older American charity] and dole out grants in small amounts. The Gates foundation gave us at IAVI a grant of $1.5m (£1m), then $25m. Then they gave us a line of credit – which is extremely unusual in grant-making – of $100m, to give us assets to be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and initiate vaccine development programmes. Using that $100m, we were able to leverage lots more funding – $800m in total. What Gates allowed us to do was go out and search for new ideas and move quickly on them. The old way was to find the new ideas, and then look for a donor to back them."

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