No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey · 14 Apr 2015 · 324pp · 93,606 words
the donations that Rockefeller, adjusted for today’s dollars, made over his entire lifetime. Today, unlike Rockefeller facing sceptical members of Congress 100 years ago, the Gates Foundation commands considerable public support, fuelled by celebrity accolades from, at times, unlikely sources. Take an encounter between Gates and P. Diddy. Gates, of course,
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and public spending has become clear in recent battles over public education in the United States. Often working in collaboration, three powerful ‘mega-foundations’ – the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family, and the Broad Foundation – are helping to build one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States: secondary and primary schools
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protecting and expanding assets rather than redistributing wealth. Philanthropy often opens up markets for US or European-based multinationals which partner with organizations such as the Gates Foundation in order to reach new consumers. Giving more is an avenue for getting more, helping to concentrate wealth in an ever-narrowing nucleus of power
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Carlos Slim? The answer is simple: there’s a need for it. Most foundations with influence on a par with the Gates Foundation have received considerable scrutiny from academics and journalists. And yet the Gates Foundation – indisputably the most influential private foundation in the world today – hasn’t received much critical attention. While positive news
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global south, and restricting the ability of southern researchers to develop homegrown technological solutions. Diane Ravitch, the noted education historian, has written critically about the Gates Foundation’s role in US public education. These are important criticisms. But they are scattered among a few newspapers and academic journals. Why the lack of
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may have single-handedly thwarted efforts to open pharmaceutical markets to more generic competition. The influential health scholar James Love has noted the problem concisely: ‘[The Gates Foundation] funds most of the journalism on this topic, and they have been hardline advocates for strong patent protection, since the 1990s. This creates more problems
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Global Fund on these issues, not to mention the press coverage and most academics and NGOs working on global health issues’.42 Another concern is the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic partnerships with Coca-Cola, a company that has spent millions lobbying against increased taxes on sugary beverages, something health advocates see as
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markets play in creating worldwide food instability. Public enthusiasm for clipping the philanthropic wings of large benefactors has ebbed and flowed throughout recent decades. The Gates Foundation’s reshaping of the global health field and the US education sector mirrors earlier initiatives led by Carnegie and Rockefeller. Their efforts helped to pioneer
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up, the CGI claims to have secured pledges worth $103 billion. It’s a gigantic sum, trebling the amount disbursed by the Gates Foundation to date. Whether or not you like how the Gates Foundation has spent its money, however, at least it has actually been spent. The Clinton Global Initiative is a clearing house.
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to rehabilitate the image of industrialists who earned their fortunes through predatory, often illegal actions. Large foundations such as the Carnegie, Ford, and today, the Gates Foundation, are often sole sources of income for smaller non-profit organizations. The power invested in foundations has led, as Dowie writes, to numerous complaints over
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is that as well as benefiting from the government’s largesse, for-profit organizations are increasingly privy to generous gifts from private philanthropists such as the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation frequently offers grants to for-profit companies such as, to name just three recent beneficiaries, Vodacom, Ogilvy, and ABC News (which is owned by
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headquartered in Britain, Vodafone avoided paying UK corporation tax for three straight years – and that during a period of drastic government spending cuts. Then the Gates Foundation reduces Vodafone’s expenses even further by offering the company’s subsidiary non-repayable grants worth over $6 million. Finally – and here’s the
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of immediate results. ‘We needed to figure out what things we could do that would flip the system’, Patty Stonesifer, former CEO of the Gates Foundation, said.14 The Gates Foundation is now the largest philanthropic supporter of US primary and secondary education, followed by the Walton Family Foundation. The third major philanthropic player in
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Similar frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both
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policy-makers and the education community’. While unnamed, the New York Times and other outlets reported that the foundation was believed to be the Gates Foundation.43 In 2007, the Gates Foundation appointed Vicki Phillips to the role of director of education. A former secretary of education for the state of Pennsylvania, one of Phillips
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VAM testing enthusiasts are confident that they have developed reliable statistical tools to quantify a teacher’s individual abilities in the classroom. In recent years, the Gates Foundation has funded the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, which tracks 3,000 teachers in cities across the country. In 2010, preliminary
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evaluation systems’.50 Gates’s reference to Microsoft’s personnel system raises an important question. By the admission of both Gates himself and Jeff Raikes, the Gates Foundation’s former CEO, the foundation often emulates strategies developed at Microsoft. But is adopting Microsoft HR strategies advisable for improving teacher effectiveness in American
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philanthropy is more of it; the failure of philanthropy is its own success.59 The perceived necessity – even the indispensability – of a donor like the Gates Foundation grows in proportion to its own inability to achieve the unachievable: mitigating the very inequalities that its own presence might be inadvertently compounding. As Foucault
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good. In the late 1990s, for example, worldwide donors cumulatively spent a rather paltry sum on malaria research each year – approximately $84 million. Since the Gates Foundation began prioritizing malaria research, the amount spent yearly has more than tripled. The foundation has also boosted global spending on tuberculosis, and recently ramped up
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polio efforts have intensified are the same countries neglecting routine immunization for other infectious diseases – India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. And despite vaccine research funded by the Gates Foundation and elsewhere, the difficulty of fully eradicating vaccine-derived poliovirus, a mutation of the virus contained in the oral vaccine, still lingers. ‘I can’
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eradication is most likely – the areas with the least need’.15 Polio is not the only ‘donor darling’ drawing criticism from global health experts. The Gates Foundation has called loudly and bullishly for national governments to prioritize the inclusion of a number of different high-cost vaccines on national immunization programmes. The
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reactions during a clinical trial. Spirited public discussion over the legal responsibilities of organizations carrying out clinical trials in India helps to make clear why the Gates Foundation’s funding of ethically fraught medical experiments frustrates Indian health activists. ‘Whose impact on India’s health policies has been worse?’ one attendee in
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too obviously at the Indian researchers scattered throughout the room. ‘At least Rockefeller built institutions!’ one researcher, dressed in a sari, called out eventually. ‘The Gates Foundation just leaves chaos. Not only is it changing the ideology of public health – it is deinstitutionalizing public health’.29 I glanced around. Most faces were
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unperturbed. Some nodded in agreement. The anger directed at the Gates Foundation might surprise people living in wealthy nations. Indeed, even vehement critics of the foundation’s influence on US public education seem to have a remarkably
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is widely perceived by casual observers in the west. Surprising as it may be, African nations didn’t suddenly sprout medical systems the moment the Gates Foundation emerged on the global health scene less than twenty years ago. African communities have been battling to improve community-based infrastructures since before the colonial
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sustainable rural water delivery services; IRC-Ghana is an offshoot of a Dutch-based non-profit that receives substantial funding from the Gates Foundation and other donors. Before touching specifically on the Gates Foundation, Duti mentioned the importance of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which resulted from a high-level summit on overseas aid
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, the chance of a person transmitting the disease diminishes the sooner they are started on HIV treatments. In the wake of the Harvard statement, the Gates Foundation announced a surprise press conference. Together with the heads of the Rockefeller and the United Nations Foundations, Gates appeared personally at the press conference.
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often praised for putting his fortune towards combating HIV. But his campaigning against increasing antiretroviral treatment in poor countries infuriates health activists who say that the Gates Foundation has continually lobbied against price reductions for HIV drugs and other medicines. These activists want a more equitable global patent regime, fostering fair competition.
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partners in serodiscordant couples was expected to be released. The WHO abruptly chose to delay the guidance. Many people attributed its reticence to opposition from the Gates Foundation, which was strongly invested in separate studies exploring the medical benefits of pre-exposure prophylactic treatments (PrEP), a new HIV treatment method which involves
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as compounding recent spikes in seed and food prices, are, however, not mentioned. A closer look at the connections between Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and the Gates Foundation will help in understanding why the foundation’s investments in global agriculture may be compounding food insecurity rather than mitigating it. Global food prices began
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but it continues to collaborate on philanthropic ventures aimed at expanding the company’s presence in African markets. By partnering with companies such as Monsanto, the Gates Foundation is eroding the positive effects of its investment in programmes such as Purchase for Progress, provoking bewilderment and anger from farmers who have seen their
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HIV/AIDS.30 Despite the staggering cost of deaths from chronic diseases worldwide, the vast majority of philanthropic donors, including the Gates Foundation, have shown scant interest in tackling the problem. To date, the Gates Foundation has invested less than 4 per cent of funding into research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Tikki Pangestu, a
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cent now are voluntary contributions’. Voluntary, or extra-budgetary contributions as they are termed, are earmarked for specific interventions stipulated by donors such as the Gates Foundation. As leading global health scholar Devi Sridhar has emphasized, studies show that voluntary contributions to the WHO are far less aligned with the actual global
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partnered with Coca-Cola in a number of partnerships encouraging communities in developing nations to become business affiliates of Coca-Cola. In 2010, for example, the Gates Foundation provided a $7.5 million grant to TechnoServe, a non-profit organization that works to expand business opportunities for multinational firms in developing regions.
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the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a pan-African platform composed of different farmers organizations throughout the continent, submitted an ‘open letter’ to the Gates Foundation and Iowa State University expressing concern over human feeding trials of GM bananas taking place at the university. The results of the trials were aimed
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of GM crops in the nation. Signatories to the open letter included 127 different NGOs and human rights organizations throughout the world. The response from the Gates Foundation was the same response that most concerned stakeholders receive when they question the foundation’s funding priorities: silence.43 The foundation did, however, reply
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delay in the start of the feeding trials – reportedly due to difficulties in shipping the bananas that had been developed in Australia – the Gates Foundation sent a prepared comment stating, ‘The Gates Foundation continues to support the Banana21 project, which is helping find ways to tackle vitamin A deficiency. We look forward to seeing the
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25 June 2012; Bill Gates, ‘How Good Schooling Matters’, Washington Post, 28 January 2009. 14Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 58. 15Sanford is no longer with the Gates Foundation – a few months after our interview, she took up a position at the College Board, a non-profit education institution. 16Diane Ravitch, The Death and
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23 July 2011. 39Daniel Golden, ‘Bill Gates’s School Crusade’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 15 July 2010. 40Michael Klonsky, ‘Power Philanthropy’, in Philip E. Kovacs ed., The Gates Foundation and the Future of U.S. Public Schools (New York: Routledge, 2011), 26. 41Ibid. 29. 42Lyndsey Layton, ‘How Bill Gates Pulled off the Swift Common
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1618–19; and – a seminal article on the parallels between the Gates and Rockefeller foundations – Anne-Emanuelle Birn, ‘Philanthrocapitalism, Past and Present: The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Setting(s) of the International/Global Health Agenda,’ vol 12, no. 1(2014), e8. 2Lederer, Subjected to Science, 80–3. 3Matthew Connolly, Fatal
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Edmund Sanders, and Robyn Dixon, ‘Dark Clouds Over Good Works of Gates Foundation,’ LA Times, 7 January 2007; see also Alex Park and Jaeah Lee, ‘The Gates Foundation’s Hypocritical Investments’ Mother Jones, 6 December 2013. 39David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu and Martin McKee, ‘Global Health Philanthropy and Institutional Relationships: How Should Conflicts of
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, 1995). Knowledge Ecology International also has a useful timeline on its website exploring important patent rulings in relationship to the work of both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation; see keionline.org/microsoft-timeline. 3Rivlin, The Plot to Get Bill Gates, 98. 4David Bank, Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future
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Kerlin, ‘Special Report’. 40Elizabeth Woyke, ‘How NYU chose Colombia over Coke’. BusinessWeek, 23 January 2006. 41TechnoServe press release, ‘The Coca-Cola Company, Technoserve and the Gates Foundation Partner to Boost Incomes of 50,000 Small-Scale Farmers in East Africa’, 20 January 2010, at technoserve.org. 42See Stuckler et al., ‘Global Health
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs
by John Doerr · 23 Apr 2018 · 280pp · 71,268 words
publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Doerr, John E., author. Title: Measure what matters : how Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation rock the world with OKRs / John Doerr. Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002727| ISBN 9780525536222 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525536239 (epub
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transparency to fortify a software pioneer’s open culture. 10 Superpower #3: Track for Accountability OKRs help us monitor progress and course-correct. 11 Track: The Gates Foundation Story A $20 billion start-up wields OKRs to fight devastating diseases. 12 Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing OKRs empower us to achieve the seemingly
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, take a breath to savor your progress. Throw a party with the team to celebrate your growing OKR superpowers. You’ve earned it. 11 Track: The Gates Foundation Story Bill Gates Cochairman Patty Stonesifer Former CEO In 2000, the newly hatched Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation became something the world had never seen: a
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early for us. That was our biggest advantage: We aimed higher. Making Goals Concrete In the year 2000, Melinda and I put $20 billion into the Gates Foundation. Suddenly it’s both a start-up and the biggest foundation in the world. And the way the payout rules work, it has to spend
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, but bold goals don’t faze them. * * * — Case in point: the ongoing fight against the most lethal animal on the planet, the mosquito. * In 2016, the Gates Foundation teamed with the British government in a five-year, $4.3 billion campaign to eradicate malaria, the deadliest of all tropical diseases. Driven by empirical
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how they inspire workers, develop leaders, and unify teams to do great things. By measuring what matters, objectives and key results are helping Bono and the Gates Foundation mobilize against poverty and disease in Africa. They’re driving Google in its audacious 10x quest to make the world’s information freely accessible to
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life and real time. So here is a special thanks to the storytellers, who shared so generously from their experiences. I want to start with the Gates Foundation team, past and present, who are especially inspiring for the breathtaking scope and lifesaving impact of their work. Thank you, Bill and Melinda, Patty Stonesifer
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was blazing speed at the time, but today you can buy a $300 Chromebook that runs better than two giga hertz—250 times faster. * As the Gates Foundation made a series of eight-figure grant awards to the Carter Center, the number of reported cases of Guinea worm disease dropped from 75,223
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
by Noam Scheiber · 6 Apr 2026 · 399pp · 120,332 words
later became a family friend. It took him all of six months to become conversational. Then, in ninth grade, he entered a program funded by the Gates Foundation that prepared poor and working-class kids for college by tutoring them on the SAT and enrolling them in summer classes at the University of
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab · 13 Nov 2023 · 618pp · 179,407 words
innovator. Beyond creating complex procurement mechanisms that purchase medicine, like Gavi, Gates wants his foundation involved in the actual creation of new lifesaving pharmaceuticals. The Gates Foundation reports spending billions of dollars for projects related to pneumonia, for example, including funding directed at the development of new vaccines. Gates has given charitable
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, including GSK, Pfizer, SK bioscience, PnuVax, Genocea, Matrivax, the Serum Institute of India, and Inventprise. “There were actually many, many more,” Amit Srivastava, previously the Gates Foundation’s global lead for pneumococcal vaccine development, told me. As examples, he pointed to the foundation’s partnerships throughout China with companies like Sinopharm and
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surprising, and maybe not even controversial, that the foundation endorses this approach in its work on pharmaceuticals. What is surprising, and controversial, is that the Gates Foundation, a nonprofit, tax-privileged charity, is so involved in the commercial marketplace around pharmaceutical development. Gates’s expansive corporate partnerships have long raised questions about
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confidential information about their company’s pharmaceutical development during the negotiation of a charitable grant. The foundation never came through with the money. Buried on the Gates Foundation’s website is a survey instrument that asks its vaccine development partners for detailed business information. “Any data received from a manufacturer or obtained
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Inventprise, which seems to be the design of its financing arrangement, sales of the new vaccine could drive new revenue into the Gates Foundation. It’s difficult, then, to ignore the optics: The Gates Foundation is operating like a pharmaceutical company. One vaccine developer I interviewed believes that Bill Gates is actually trying to create the
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widespread allegations of harassment and discrimination from women working at Microsoft? What about the Gates Foundation’s money manager, Michael Larson? What about the Gates Foundation’s yearslong, still-unclear relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? What about Epstein’s countless victims? And what about the Gates Foundation’s wholesale failure to address these issues internally? Should the foundation be
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-funded Stanford report phrased it differently: “As Zyomyx’s largest equity holder and an observer on its board [of directors], the Gates Foundation had the tools to protect its charitable objectives.” With the Gates Foundation at the helm, the project failed fast. Mylan eventually pulled out, and Gates began winding down Zyomyx, offering it a
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other than those offered through its massive PR machinery. When Adam Fejerskov set out to research the Gates Foundation for his academic book The Gates Foundation’s Rise to Power: Private Authority in Global Politics, he reached out directly to the Gates Foundation early in his project, hoping to set up interviews. Fejerskov was interested in how the foundation
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that populate the news media today. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively, both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) deployed their fact-checkers to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” specifically the allegation that the foundation had financial investments in companies
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readily project shifting organizational identities, sometimes appearing as an NGO, sometimes as a multinational company, and sometimes even as a state actor,” Fejerskov writes. “The Gates Foundation strategically practices a hybrid authority, allowing it to alternately expand and compress its organizational identity, sometimes assuming multiple organizational forms and at other times (particularly
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meeting in a private residence in Manhattan to discuss potential philanthropic partnerships, with Gates reportedly pushing the group to consider work on overpopulation. Historically, the Gates Foundation has tracked this work to the social problems it believes overpopulation causes. In its early days, the foundation gave generously to the Population Resource Center
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alongside access to abortion, fertility treatments, and a variety of reproductive health care like Pap smears, breast exams, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. While the Gates Foundation clearly understands these perspectives and even parrots these points of view in its rhetoric, its philanthropic interventions, in practice, appear far more concerned with meeting
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—or carrot—that visited Park and Fortner when they teamed up on a reporting project for the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent examining the Gates Foundation’s work on polio. Incredibly, the Gates Foundation, once again, went over their heads. Rachel Lonsdale, the head of Gates’s polio communications team, contacted the outlet’s editor,
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other dimensions of editorial influence from donors. In 2018, Bhekisisa, a media outlet based in South Africa and mostly funded by the Gates Foundation, published an essay about working with charitable donors, mentioning the Gates Foundation and the German government: “Bhekisisa’s donor resources, and accompanying impact, has come at a great cost. It has
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Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg. When I spoke to Bornstein and Rosenberg in 2020, the group’s largest all-time funder was the Gates Foundation, which has given at least seven million dollars. The Gates Foundation also reports giving millions of dollars to other outlets for work on solutions journalism, including Grist and the Stichting European Journalism
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virtually universal ethical rules in journalism require newsrooms to disclose financial conflicts of interest to readers. In short, if you’re reporting on the Gates Foundation, and you’re funded by the Gates Foundation, readers must have this information. And failing to be transparent is a recipe for public distrust. If the foundation wanted to, it
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which he views his charitable giving. It highlights the existential limits of what he can accomplish, and it explains why the Gates Foundation has achieved so little. 11 Bloat In 2014, the Gates Foundation was experiencing technical issues tracking and managing the charitable grants it made—a sad irony for an institution run by one
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to Gates. If so, it would be a powerful statement about Buffett’s loss of confidence in the effectiveness of the Gates Foundation. Whatever Warren Buffett, born in 1930, decides to do, the Gates Foundation still has to contend with Bill Gates’s personal wealth—more than $100 billion as of early 2023. Gates, born
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scientific discourse, or the same influence in the public discourse, as the work Gates funds. To a very large extent, what we know about the Gates Foundation comes from the Gates Foundation itself. * * * CHRIS MURRAY IS a towering figure in the world of global health—and he enjoys a level of prestige and wealth like
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little more than write checks. “We would not consider the IHME to be an institute that was, you know, founded by the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation has provided a lot of financial support to the IHME—that’s at the IHME’s request. They [IHME] come up with individual projects,
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research questions they want to have answered and so on, and then they propose to the Gates Foundation—that the Gates Foundation provide funding for those things, as designed by the IHME. And then Gates either says yes or no,” Giffels told me. I also asked him
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from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. Even today, many top brass and board members are not based in Africa—like Rodger Voorhies of the Gates Foundation. Internal policy documents at the Gates Foundation describe AGRA as an example of where it is “creating a new entity and providing significant funding”—and also serving in a governance
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and infant mortality rates dropping by more than 30 percent. But where do these numbers come from? How much credit does the Gates Foundation really deserve for this work? Why do the Gates Foundation and CARE benchmark their success based on data from 2005—years before the foundation’s interventions began? (CARE did not respond
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advisory committees in countries across Africa and Asia. These groups generally provide scientific and technical advice to governments, which informs national vaccine policy. In India, the Gates Foundation has served as the funder of India’s Immunization Technical Support Unit, which provides “techno-managerial” assistance. The Indian government defines the unit’s
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have never had in the United States—Indian legislators, policy makers, and journalists began very publicly interrogating the phenomenal financial conflicts of interest underpinning the Gates Foundation’s charitable enterprise. The foundation makes charitable donations and engages in a wide variety of other financing mechanisms that help Big Pharma grow their businesses
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deserve healthy lives. I resigned from it for the exact same reason. By presenting Mr. Modi with this award, the Gates Foundation is going against its own core belief,” Sabah Hamid wrote. “The Gates Foundation has crossed the wide gulf between working with a regime and endorsing it. That is not the pragmatic agnosticism of
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GoI, Think Tanks, International Organisations and G20 member & invitee countries etc. A source with direct knowledge confirmed that the unnamed “American private foundation” was the Gates Foundation. 15 Covid-19 Years before the word Covid burned itself into public consciousness, researchers at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute had been developing
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put its surrogates CEPI and Gavi in charge, allowing Gates to disclaim any influence (or responsibility) when convenient. “The PR person at the Gates Foundation will often say, ‘Oh, you know, the Gates Foundation is not on that body, I really suggest you direct your questions to Gavi or CEPI,’” Kate Elder of MSF told me
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spends (slightly) more: “Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends,” Treatment Action Group, December 2022, Figure 10, https://www.treatmentactiongroup.org/resources/tbrd-report/tbrd-report-2022/. Note: The Gates Foundation grant records show $10 million in donations to the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and $44 million to the Foundation
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:55. survey instrument: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, “Production Economics for Vaccines,” 2016, https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/PE_Vaccines_Appendix_2016.xlsm. Iqbal later left the Gates Foundation: Robyn Iqbal, LinkedIn profile, https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyniqbal/. “locked up”: “WHO Official Criticizes Gates Foundation ‘Cartel’ on Malaria Research,” New York Times,
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and at the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-farnum-4b180a1); Ralf Clemens, a scientific adviser to the Gates Foundation (LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralf-clemens-75578513/details/organizations/); and Stewart Parker, a Seattle-based consultant who previously ran the Gates-funded Infectious
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-trust.html. equestrian facility in Wellington, Florida: Bandell, “Bill Gates, Jennifer Gates’ Trust Sells Wellington Equestrian Property.” chocolate and cocoa companies: Alex Park, “Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?,” Mother Jones (blog), December 8, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/gates-foundation-still-investing-private-prisons; Laura
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of its URLs, or links, to audits are dead or missing. Later, the foundation put its endowment into a separate entity, the Gates Foundation Trust, which reports its own financials. To find the Gates Foundation’s investment income, I used “investment income, net” as reported in its annual financial audits, which were not published until
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.intellectualventures.com/what-we-do/global-good-fund/our-work. “controlled subsidiary”: This $500 million, notably, did not come through charitable grants from the Gates Foundation, but rather through transfers from the Gates Foundation’s endowment. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, 990-PF, Statement 12, Transfers to Controlled Entities, 2010–2020. Note: In 2010, the
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-outlawed-in-washington-state-will-whistleblowers-speak-up/. “mechanism of public accountability”: Friedman and Sunderland, “How to Fix the Gates Foundation.” scroll through page after page: Before I began my first investigation into the Gates Foundation, I contacted them to see if they would give me an Excel spreadsheet containing all their charitable grants—as
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tax filing showing some of the recipients—but not all and not in a way that allows us to see which funds came from the Gates Foundation. In total, the Gates Foundation has donated close to $7 billion to organizations with the word foundation in their name. “who in turn fund others”: Again, in the
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15, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-climate-change-disaster-60-minutes-2021-02-14/. gee-whiz questions: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 0:10. province of Uttar Pradesh: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 2:20. Bill was getting all the credit: Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How
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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Part VII, IRS 990 filing, 2001. “what motivates these people”: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 2:30. poor villagers in India: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 3:25. Traveling to the Indian countryside: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 0:55. “she’d have eight children”: “Extra: Gates on
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Undermine Journalistic Credibility?,” Undark, April 22, 2016, https://undark.org/2016/04/22/do-industry-partnerships-undermine-journalistic-credibility/; “The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Gates Foundation.” American Public Media: Mike Janssen, “Gates Funding Spurs Doubts over Pubmedia’s Impartiality in Education Reporting,” September 9, 2014, https://current.org/2014/09/
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Is Ruining Education,” GeekWire, June 27, 2014, https://www.geekwire.com/2014/teachers-protest-gates-foundation/; Jesse Hagopian, “Debating the Gates Foundation,” Socialist Worker, March 13, 2012, https://socialistworker.org/2012/03/13/debating-the-gates-foundation. “shaming poorly performing teachers”: Gates, “For Teachers, Shame Is No Solution.” preposterous good-cop routine: Anthony Cody, “Teachers
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Center for Health Journalism; Schwab, “The Conflict over Conflicts of Interest.” criticism as a “black box”: “IHME Global Public Goods,” OPP1152504, Grant proposal narrative to the Gates Foundation, IHME, September 20, 2015. pushes back on allegations: Schwab, “Playing Games with Public Health Data”; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Client Services Unit,
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being transparent” and that “the extensive resources of IHME relative to other institutions have created an unhealthy imbalance in the field.” The evaluators called on the Gates Foundation, as the IHME’s primary funder, to improve its accountability and transparency. institute’s first temporary offices: Schwab, “Playing Games with Public Health Data.”
Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
by Anupreeta Das · 12 Aug 2024 · 315pp · 115,894 words
planning and gender equity. In 2006, the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett announced that he would transfer the bulk of his multibillion-dollar fortune to the Gates Foundation. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, had met Gates in 1991 and the two became fast friends. Twenty-five years older than Gates,
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commitment, effectively impossible to enforce or track, and in the end, perhaps little more than a showcase for a billionaire’s generous intentions. Today, the Gates Foundation has enough global heft that it can shape development agendas through its grant-making, particularly in low-income countries. It donates as much money to
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candidacy for the big prize, some of his handlers for years strategically launched publicity campaigns when the world was nearing a public health milestone that the Gates Foundation was involved in. At the same time, criticisms of the foundation’s bigfooting abound. Its activities have been described as antidemocratic, neocolonial, technocratic, and
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optimistic, populist billionaire was complete. The Reign of Janus Every year, Gates—and, until she left, French Gates—would hold multiple meetings with executives of the Gates Foundation to approve plans and budgets, and review strategies. One of the highlights was the annual strategy review meeting, where the two of them listened to
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billion, and the acquisition had caught the attention of the financial and science press. Knowing his interest in agriculture given that it was one of the Gates Foundation’s focus areas, Cunningham brought up the deal. He could tell Gates was immediately engaged, launching into a discussion about the merits of agricultural
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away all his Berkshire shares.) Only decades later would the broader implications of that lifetime pledge become an issue of significance for future funding at the Gates Foundation, the four Buffett family foundations, and the responsibilities of his three children. It would also come to strain Buffett’s friendship with Gates. But
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to expand the foundation’s programs, defining new strategies and foci in global health, agriculture, and development. Prabhu Pingali, a professor at Cornell University, joined the Gates Foundation in 2008. Pingali, who worked at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome at that time, recalled a visit from foundation executives who
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word “lifetime” to avoid any miscommunication or confusion about which philanthropies stood to get his money, partly because there was a longstanding assumption within the Gates Foundation that it would always get Buffett’s money, three of the people said. In a footnote to its combined financial statements for 2022 and 2021
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employee who runs Charity Navigator, a nonprofit organization that evaluates other nonprofits to help people direct their giving. Charity Navigator had been receiving grants from the Gates Foundation for several years. When the divorce was announced, the foundation’s grant officers reached out to say that they wouldn’t be able to
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giving interviews to magazines and newspapers, and creating the conditions for her emergence as an independent feminist-philanthropist. By 2024, when she decided to leave the Gates Foundation to pursue her own form of philanthropy, that identity had fully taken hold. It was French Gates’s moment of lift. Scenes from a Marriage
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has become increasingly popular with philanthropists, Pivotal has sought to be more experimental and innovative, while bringing the same analysis and rigor to projects as the Gates Foundation does, according to an outside consultant who has worked with the firm. Pivotal’s main goals are getting more women into technology jobs and
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stands out for its $1 billion commitment to the pandemic recovery, announced in October 2020, but those commitments were made with far less fanfare. The Gates Foundation’s singular role in the pandemic response may have surprised some in the wider world, but public health experts, policymakers, and economists in the field
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Eradication Initiative, which was created in 1988 by the WHO, UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Rotary International, a community service organization. The Gates Foundation is also the primary partner of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI. Funded by the governments of several countries, including the United Kingdom
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as the Wellcome Trust, a U.K.-based healthcare philanthropy, CEPI makes grants to speed up development of vaccines during pandemics and outbreaks. In 2010, the Gates Foundation launched the “decade of vaccines” in partnership with governmental and multilateral organizations including the WHO. Its goal was to spur research and delivery of vaccines
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at NIH events, discussing the zika virus, tuberculosis, and other topics of public health. During the pandemic, that network of alliances funded and nurtured by the Gates Foundation over the years gave it substantial influence in shaping the direction of vaccine research and delivery to low-income countries. The Gates-backed vaccine alliance
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2015 as a “universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” Currently, the Gates Foundation makes grants largely in five big areas: global health, gender equality, global development, global growth and opportunity, and global policy and advocacy. A sixth
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the foundation for his work, said that many other big grant-making bodies invite competitive proposals for grants and give out the funds. But with the Gates Foundation, academics and nonprofits searching for a grant often end up turning to their networks for introductions to foundation employees who might consider their project.
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always say that they’re giving their money away.15 In his book Winners Take All, the journalist Anand Giridharadas criticizes all big philanthropy, including the Gates Foundation, for trying to “solve for” individual, intractable issues via technology, rather than fighting for ground-up social and economic justice or change. Giridharadas and
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standards didn’t give individual schools enough adaptability. Diane Ravitch, a former research professor of education at New York University and an outspoken critic of the Gates Foundation, once called the billionaire the nation’s unelected school superintendent. On her blog, Ravitch pointed out that by 2022, no one had expected that
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who argue that private philanthropy, which is subsidized by taxpayers because charitable deductions are essentially lost tax revenue, is antidemocratic because a massive entity like the Gates Foundation reports only to itself; with no voters or shareholders to hold it publicly accountable, it can ignore alternate points of view and direct outcomes in
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and the World Bank, whose efforts to “solve” poverty with Western expertise either backfired or produced mixed results at best. It doesn’t help that the Gates Foundation seems to borrow freely and extensively from those approaches to global development, where words like “partnerships,” “stakeholders,” “progress,” “prosperity,” “equity,” “transformation,” “solutions,” and “sustainability”
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the “data-driven” approach that was au courant in philanthropy, arguing for an approach that was based more on intuition than simply data. Additionally, the Gates Foundation has come in for criticism for its unquestioned belief in the power of technology to solve problems. Tied to its technological bias, critics say, is
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an opinion piece for Project Syndicate in 2021. Both Friedman and Sunderland are former senior foundation executives. Friedman is a former chief financial officer for the Gates Foundation, hired in 2007 to help the entity grow and manage its finances better after the Buffett gift. Sunderland led the foundation’s investment partnerships with
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Suzman said, possessed “amazing expertise and background that could really add value to helping us make better strategic decisions.” However, Suzman was very clear that the Gates Foundation was “unequivocally” a family foundation that wasn’t about to change its mission and priorities.25 In the summer of 2021, the foundation had said
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. For all the criticisms, though, the foundation is undeterred. Paul Schervish, a professor emeritus at Boston College who has long studied philanthropic models, likened the Gates Foundation to an elephant, and the critics to mosquitoes. “The mosquitoes won’t bring down the elephant and you may not hear the elephants doing much
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after the United Nations announced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by its member states that the world should try to meet by 2030, the Gates Foundation put together its own initiative called Goalkeepers. It brought together what it called “a global collective of collaborative and diverse changemakers,” a jumble of
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National Nutrition Mission because one of the chronic problems India faces is malnourishment, which has long-term implications for the workforce, including productivity and mortality. The Gates Foundation and other agencies partnered with the government to carry out its mission. However, the visuals they created of nutritional and balanced diets contained images of
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more funding than one that is focused on other mosquito-borne diseases or on diarrhea. A public health professional in Vietnam who has worked with the Gates Foundation dubbed it the “Gates effect.” Imprint Billionaires have long endowed university chairs, funded hospitals, given support to religious or humanitarian causes, or written checks
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he is one of the most active philanthropists around, having given away more than $17 billion. Trevor Neilson, one of the early employees of the Gates Foundation, built an entire business around philanthropic strategy. He created the Global Philanthropy Group, which worked with 40 or so philanthropists to build out their strategy
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and identify potential philanthropy partners, build advisory boards, hire people, and get the outfit up and running. Neilson used his brief but formative experience at the Gates Foundation to tell others: “Gates is the model to emulate if you’re trying to build a strategy for philanthropy.” In Silicon Valley, where wealth
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Cascade NDAs said they were so expansive as to prohibit employees and external managers from talking about their employer, Larson, Gates, French Gates, and even the Gates Foundation. Similar NDAs were also required of senior executives elsewhere in the Gates universe. Lawyers for Cascade have sometimes called people who they thought had broken
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idea to Gates, and even included slides: Could some of the billionaire philanthropic dollars being pledged be pooled into a charitable fund created for the Gates Foundation? Such donor-advised funds are vehicles created by banks and other big asset managers into which wealthy individuals can deposit money that they eventually plan
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million. Like other donor-advised funds, this one too would provide donors the tax benefits up front. The proposed structure would involve silos—areas that the Gates Foundation focused on, such as polio, maternal health, vaccines, and agriculture—that donors wanted to direct their money into. Membership to this donor club would
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it felt like God had fallen to earth. Gates was suddenly both philanthropist and philanderer, and a womanizer whose foundation worked for women’s rights. The Gates Foundation, already sensitive to the criticisms about its top-down structure and size, used the opportunity to make changes in its governing structure. In January
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an essay for The New England Journal of Medicine—which typically publishes medical research—about how to coordinate a pandemic response. At the same time, the Gates Foundation was working closely with pharmaceutical companies and governments on vaccines. His public presence was so widespread that people like Chapman, who only had a
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bed nets that the foundation and other health agencies distribute, creating new challenges even as the existing ones evade conquest. Polio, another big priority for the Gates Foundation, too has proved impossible to uproot. The highly infectious and crippling disease cannot be cured, but multiple vaccinations can prevent it. In 1988, the
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document established new and pressing targets: reducing economic disparity, combating climate change, and promoting sustainable growth. The goals have also shaped the recent priorities of the Gates Foundation, but it’s already clear that the world is unlikely to fulfill them by 2030. The pandemic had created massive roadblocks, choking off access to
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vaccines because supply chains broke down and healthcare systems were too overwhelmed to administer routine immunizations. In April 2023, as the pandemic ebbed, the Gates Foundation, along with global agencies like the WHO and UNICEF, announced an urgent vaccination campaign called “The Big Catch-Up.” With more than 25 million children
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should assume that the information is synthesized from multiple accounts of an event or experience. Bill Gates, his representatives at Gates Ventures, and representatives of the Gates Foundation did not participate. Once presented with the information in this book, they stonewalled for months. Following multiple entreaties, both organizations initially said they would not
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Krista Rasmussen, “Who Actually Funds the UN and Other Multilaterals?,” January 9, 2018. 10. Kirstin R.W. Mathews and Vivian Ho, “The Grand Impact of the Gates Foundation,” EMBO Reports 9, no. 5 (2008): 409–12. 11. “Funding to Universities by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” University Philanthropy Research by the Cape
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Partnership, August 2021. 12. Julia Belluz, “The Media Loves the Gates Foundation. These Academics Are More Skeptical,” Vox, June 10, 2015. 13. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World (New York: Bloomsbury
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14. Kavita Ramdas, “Philanthrocapitalism Is Not Social Change Philanthropy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2011. 15. Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (London: Verso, 2015), 24. 16. Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Vintage
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website), “PM Modi’s Candid Conversation with Bill Gates,” press release, March 29, 2024. 29. Manjari Mahajan, “Philanthropy and the Nation-State in Global Health: The Gates Foundation in India,” Global Public Health 13, no. 10 (2018): 1357–68. 30. Manoj Mohanan et al., “Effect of A Large-Scale Franchising and Telemedicine Program
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December 30, 2022. 7. Steven Levy, “Bill Gates Is Upbeat on Climate, Capitalism and Even Politics,” Wired, March 18, 2021. 8. Bill Gates, “By 2026, the Gates Foundation Aims to Spend $9 Billion a Year,” GatesNotes, July 13, 2022. Further Reading Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward. New York: Penguin Books
How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates · 2 May 2022 · 406pp · 88,977 words
in mid-February 2020 when I realized that COVID-19 would become a global disaster. For several weeks, I had been talking with experts at the Gates Foundation about a new respiratory disease that was circulating in China and had just begun to spread elsewhere. We’re lucky to have a team of
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didn’t work well enough. The problem was that there was hardly any system at all. I still didn’t think it made sense for the Gates Foundation to make this one of its top priorities. After all, we focus on areas where the markets fail to solve big problems, and I thought
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and massive disruption. This TED talk has been viewed 43 million times, but 95 percent of those views have come since the COVID pandemic started. The Gates Foundation, in partnership with the governments of Germany, Japan, and Norway, and the Wellcome Trust, created an organization called CEPI—the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations
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them up rapidly. Maybe I should have written this book in 2015, but I doubt many people would have read it. * * * — In early January 2020, the Gates Foundation team we had set up to monitor outbreaks after the Ebola scare was tracking the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus we now know
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to sit next to him (virtually, of course). One side effect of speaking out, though, is that it has provoked more of the criticisms of the Gates Foundation’s work that I’ve been hearing for years. The most thoughtful version goes like this: Bill Gates is an unelected billionaire—who is he
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to set the agenda on health or anything else? Three corollaries of this criticism are that the Gates Foundation has too much influence, that I have too much faith in the private sector as an engine of change, and that I’m a technophile
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, and I don’t plan to seek one. And I agree that it’s not good for society when rich people have undue influence. But the Gates Foundation does not use its resources or its influence in secret. We’re open about what we fund and what the results have been—the failures
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support from governments even though, as this pandemic has shown, they clearly benefit society as a whole. Nobody would be happier than I would if the Gates Foundation’s funding became a much smaller proportion of global spending in the coming years—because, as this book will argue, these are investments in a
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, I’m going to use COVID to refer to both the disease COVID-19 and the virus that causes it. *4 I’ve already mentioned the Gates Foundation several times in this Introduction, and I’ll be mentioning it more throughout this book. This is not because I want to brag, but because
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About the word we: I use it in various ways in this book. Sometimes I’m referring to work I am personally involved in (or the Gates Foundation is). But for the sake of simplicity, I also use we to refer to the global health sector more broadly, or to the world at
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since nobody knew for certain which ones were the main causes of child mortality, we didn’t know how to prevent those deaths. Over time, the Gates Foundation and other organizations funded studies that pointed to rotavirus as a major cause, and researchers were able to develop an affordable rotavirus vaccine that prevented
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the summer of 2018, a handful of people in genomics and infectious diseases came to a joint realization. Although they represented different institutions—Fred Hutch, the Gates Foundation, and another group called the Institute for Disease Modeling[*2]—they were all worrying about the same problem: outbreaks of respiratory viruses. These outbreaks kill
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of how the virus would spread in low- and middle-income countries. (In fact, they often outperformed IDM, the group that’s now part of the Gates Foundation—and the IDM team would be the first people to tell you that.) To get an idea of what modelers do when they’re trying
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There isn’t yet any mechanism for making sure they actually take these steps, though. *2 The Institute for Disease Modeling is now part of the Gates Foundation. *3 RNA viruses actually have Us instead of Ts, but the two substances are functionally identical, so I am sticking with Ts for the sake
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up in the hospital by at least 70 percent. I had high hopes for mAbs in the early days of COVID—so much so that the Gates Foundation paid to have up to 3 million doses set aside for high-risk patients in poor countries. But we soon learned that mAbs weren’t
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. To resolve this, donors will hire experts and fund the optimization work and the upfront costs of implementing a new process. In 2017, for example, the Gates Foundation and a number of partners helped create a generic form of a more effective version of an HIV drug cocktail, work that was enabled by
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C. May 20, the day Lind began his trial, has been designated International Clinical Trials Day. *2 Initially launched by the Wellcome Trust, Mastercard, and the Gates Foundation. *3 Generic manufacturers are also the reason why you might be able to get significantly cheaper versions of some of the prescriptions you take. *4
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, they had no way of expressing their needs in ways that matter to markets. So they went without. One of our first major projects at the Gates Foundation was to help create and organize Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance,[*2] an organization that pools donations to help poor countries buy vaccines. Gavi created a
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vaccine supply for the entire world were made in 2020. In the first half of that year, several organizations—including CEPI, Gavi, national governments, and the Gates Foundation—worked with many of the companies in the vaccine ecosystem on arrangements that would maximize the number of vaccines produced. The approach used wasn’t
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2000s, but there was only one manufacturer, and at more than $3.50 per dose, it was quite expensive for low- and middle-income countries. The Gates Foundation and its partners worked with two vaccine companies in India—Bio E. and SII, the same two that more recently started producing COVID vaccines—to
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from less than half the country to the entire country—a decision that will save the lives of tens of thousands of children every year. The Gates Foundation has been the largest funder of vaccine manufacturing in developing countries over the past two decades. What we’ve learned from that experience is that
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after a disastrous outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001, the United Kingdom and five Nordic countries ran simulations to test their readiness. *2 The Gates Foundation was one of the funders of the Event 201 exercise. Some conspiracy theorists suggested that it predicted COVID. As the organizers made clear, it wasn
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children who need them and friends who cherish them—and we ought to help them.” I could not agree more. When Melinda and I started the Gates Foundation two decades ago, we decided that providing resources to reduce and eventually get rid of this inequity would be our biggest focus. The moral arguments
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do even better. At least it did for me. It’s the main focus of my work since I transitioned to working full-time at the Gates Foundation. Over the years, I’ve given enough speeches on 20-10-5 and seen enough tweets and Facebook comments to know the question that inevitably
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for leaders in the health sector so they can manage their countries’ vaccine programs more effectively and increase the public’s demand for vaccines. When the Gates Foundation helped create Gavi in 2001 with the goal of making vaccines available to all the world’s children, we did not foresee the role it
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is called the primary health care system—prevent vaccines and other new tools from reaching all the patients who need them. A major part of the Gates Foundation’s work has been to help improve these systems and ensure that they can reach all kids with new vaccines—investments that both save lives
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persistence. These technologies have been in the works for a while, but progress was accelerated when demand skyrocketed during the pandemic. In the years ahead, the Gates Foundation will invest heavily in these tools and measure what works. Some of the biggest leaps forward have been in math curricula—especially algebra. Algebra I
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Swanson Williams, Tyler Wilson, Sydney Yang, Jamal Yearwood, and Mariah Young. A special thank-you to the human resources teams at both Gates Ventures and the Gates Foundation for all they’ve done during COVID to maintain a strong culture while putting everyone’s health and safety first. Chris Murray and the rest
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Gillespie, Erinn Hartman, Jessica Purcell, Julianne Clancy, Amy Hagedorn, Laura Keefe, Suzanne Smith, Serena Lehman, and Kate Hughes. Warren Buffett’s incredibly generous support for the Gates Foundation, a pledge he first made in 2006, has allowed us to expand and deepen our work around the world. I’m honored by his commitment
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In Europe the rate was: IHME results briefings for the European Union and Africa, https://healthdata.org. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Over time, the Gates Foundation: Estimates generated by the Vaccine Impact Modeling Consortium based on its publication by Jaspreet Toor et al., “Lives Saved with Vaccination for 10 Pathogens Across
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J Japan backward contact tracing in, 100 bioterror attack in, 193 as health systems model, 230 masking in, 109 mRNA vaccines in, 154 partnership with the Gates Foundation, 14 postal workers and disease surveillance, 57 Jenner, Edward, 158, 158n Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine, 155, 159, 166 K Karikó, Katalin, 150, 150, 152–53
Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
by Rob Reich · 20 Nov 2018 · 257pp · 75,685 words
Pledge signatories are to the twenty-first century. The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of unprecedentedly large foundations like the Gates Foundation. The combined assets of the Gates Foundation and a separate Gates Trust, which holds donations from Bill and Melinda Gates and contributions from Warren Buffett, totaled more than $80 billion
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change, and the scope of foundation activities, some of which are very local (community foundations) and others of which are global in reach (e.g., the Gates Foundation). The technical and conceptual issues in trying to measure redistribution notwithstanding, Wolpert concludes that foundations are at best “modestly redistributive,” as can be determined with
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direct government expenditures are. To give an obvious example, citizens can unelect their representatives if they are dissatisfied with the spending programs of the state; the Gates Foundation also has a domestic and global spending program, partly supported through tax subsidies, but its leaders and trustees cannot be unelected. Thus the success of
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a foundation stands for election, regardless of what the public thinks about the distribution of its grants. Suppose a group of people disapprove of what the Gates Foundation, or any other foundation, is doing. What then? There’s no mechanism to unelect Bill and Melinda Gates. Referring to the foundation’s education grant
Owning the Sun
by Alexander Zaitchik · 7 Jan 2022 · 341pp · 98,954 words
humanity and dedication to ending the pandemic as quickly as possible. The Accelerator’s existence, stated Cueni, obviated the need for additional efforts and initiatives. “The Gates Foundation plays a crucial role here,” he said. “We already have platforms, the industry is already doing all the right things.” As the seventy-five-minute
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salad: “We are absolutely committed to this question of access, and deeply welcome the formation of ACT, a multilateral organization . . . With multiple stakeholders . . . organizations like the Gates Foundation and Gavi and others . . . where we actually look at these principles of, uh, access and so clearly, we’re engaged in that as well.” If
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fired from a UN job. He knows that if you want to work in global public health, you’d better not make an enemy of the Gates Foundation by questioning its positions on intellectual property and monopolies.” On March 10, 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a partnership with the Wellcome
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of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations. “It was this nice full-color pamphlet about why patents don’t present an access problem, with the Gates Foundation logo at the bottom,” says Love. “It was a little strange. I thought, ‘OK, I guess this is what he’s doing now.’ Looking back
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a new dynamic. The same op-eds and talking points weren’t coming just from industry, but also from philanthropy in the form of the Gates Foundation.” The rise of the Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, quickly changed the perception of the conflict and its possible solutions, says Martin, the Médecins Sans Frontières policy
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monopolist of the Microsoft antitrust hearings. Turns out he was right here, working the same beat in plain view, all this time. 49.In 2010, the Gates Foundation would bankroll a documentary advocating the privatization of U.S. public education, titled Waiting for Superman. Fourteen CROWN JEWELS IN A BLACK BOX Trade Secrets
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). On the role of Bill Gates and the larger political questions raised by corporate megaphilanthropy, see Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (2015), Michael Barker’s The Givers That Take (2022), and Tim Schwab’s Nation magazine investigations into
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the Gates Foundation. On the WTO waiver debate and practical issues related to the obstacles posed by intellectual property, see the original proposals submitted by South Africa, India
The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale
by Simon Clark and Will Louch · 14 Jul 2021 · 403pp · 105,550 words
billion fund to improve healthcare in poor countries, and the World Bank and the American, British, and French governments invested in this pioneering fund alongside the Gates Foundation. Arif won much admiration during his career. A committee of Nobel Prize laureates selected him for an Oslo Business for Peace Award. American academics predicted
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to invest in African hospitals and clinics with the twin goals of generating profit and measurable improvements in the well-being of extremely poor people. The Gates Foundation and the World Bank’s International Finance Corp. unit were investors in the fund. Aureos’s success drew Sev into the orbit of Raj Rajaratnam
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access to a gilt-edged list of investors, including CDC and similar government funds in Norway, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the Gates Foundation and the World Bank. Abraaj urgently needed new sources of funding because Arif’s traditional Middle Eastern investors had become reluctant to support him. Some
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rhetorical skills blinded investors and politicians. They couldn’t see the flaws in how he operated. By partnering with Arif, the UN, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, and the American, British, and French governments were handing control of billions of dollars and important policy decisions to a man who was spiraling out
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few years later, Warren Buffett, a constant companion to Bill at the top of rich lists, announced he was giving most of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. Bill and Warren also founded the Giving Pledge to encourage other billionaires to give away at least half their wealth. Healthcare was at the heart
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bosses for permission and were told that they could have some cash if they found another organization prepared to join in. Scott and Emmett asked the Gates Foundation to help. The foundation agreed, and they raised about $2 million to commission McKinsey to carry out two studies. The first McKinsey report, titled “The
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ignored Oxfam and accepted McKinsey’s advice to start a private equity fund for healthcare in Africa, and Scott and Emmett started contacting potential investors. The Gates Foundation agreed to invest in the fund—its first private equity investment—joining the IFC, the German government, and the African Development Bank as investors. In
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the new healthcare fund and Sev accepted. Sev believed that managing the fund was a great chance to get to know important new investors like the Gates Foundation and Aureos received management fees for taking on the fund plus a share of any profits. Some of Sev’s colleagues at Aureos were uneasy
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he kept a photo of the two of them in his office. Little did Arif know at the time that his relationship with Bill and the Gates Foundation would lead to his undoing. Arif told Shakir and Abi to intensify their work on the global healthcare fund. If planned correctly, the fund could
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his plan at a World Economic Forum meeting to discuss Africa in Cape Town. The opportunity for Philips and Medtronic was obvious. By investing alongside the Gates Foundation in the fund, they’d increase their chances of selling their medical devices to the hospitals and clinics that Arif planned to buy and build
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, Arif was ready to unveil more details about his plans for the healthcare fund. He invited a small group of investors including Julie Sunderland from the Gates Foundation to spend a couple of days at his country house near Oxford. Management consultants also attended to help talk through the strategy. Behind the scenes
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opinion at the Oxford meeting. Abraaj executives wanted the fund to invest in companies that were very likely to make profits, but the team from the Gates Foundation was more interested in making investments that were more likely to help the very poorest Africans and were less focused on the prospects for making
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. The clashes presented Arif with a problem. Shakir was an important member of the team but Arif couldn’t afford to lose the support of the Gates Foundation. Arif began casting around for a more diplomatic leader for the new healthcare fund. Khawar Mann, a smooth-talking finance executive, fit the bill. He
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coming to our markets,” Aly told Forbes magazine. Aly flew to the United States with Sev to meet investors and delivered a polished pitch to the Gates Foundation and the IFC. But Aly soon began to doubt the wisdom of his decision to join Abraaj. Having seen how the firm operated on the
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he left the NHS, Khawar asked Sir David to join Abraaj. Khawar was setting up an impact committee to screen investments at the request of the Gates Foundation. Khawar offered Sir David $120,000 a year for just four days’ work each month. His annual salary was enough to pay the salaries of
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in the private equity industry as a “first close.” This was the point at which the fund had collected enough money to start buying companies. The Gates Foundation came good on its promise of investing $100 million. Medtronic and Philips invested too. The IFC wanted to commit but it was proving difficult to
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close to $460 million. Arif invited investors to his Mayfair office to celebrate. The meeting was Julie Sunderland’s last with Abraaj before she left the Gates Foundation to start her own healthcare investment firm. As she walked out, she had a final message. “Don’t screw this up,” she said. Flush with
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future of healthcare in developing countries. Arif took to the stage accompanied by top executives from three of the biggest investors in his healthcare fund—the Gates Foundation, Philips, and Medtronic. No doctors or nurses from developing countries were invited to speak. Nor were there any poor patients to tell their stories. The
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the fact that even the baseline of proper healthcare does not exist, so our job is actually to put that in place.” The man from the Gates Foundation could barely contain his enthusiasm for Arif’s new fund. “What makes us so excited to be a partner with everyone here on the Abraaj
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had other plans. He requested hundreds of millions of dollars from investors in the healthcare fund within a few months of finishing raising the money. The Gates Foundation, the IFC, and the other investors sent the money to Abraaj as requested. Abraaj told the investors that the money would be invested in companies
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it not been for an important moment in late 2017 when Andrew Farnum noticed some numbers didn’t add up. Andrew managed $2 billion at the Gates Foundation, including a $100 million investment in Abraaj’s healthcare fund. He couldn’t understand why Abraaj kept asking him to send more money for the
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opportunity came up which he couldn’t refuse. Bill Gates was starting his own impact-investing program in Seattle, near Andrew’s hometown. Andrew joined the Gates Foundation in 2011 and worked for Julie Sunderland, who arranged the foundation’s investment in Abraaj’s healthcare fund. When Julie left in 2016, Andrew took
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preached doing the right thing in Singapore, his colleagues were doing the wrong thing in Dubai. They were debating how to throw Andrew Farnum and the Gates Foundation off their tracks and cover up one of the most audacious frauds in history. First, they decided to fob Andrew off with a vague answer
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account or investment information you can share?” His persistence worried Ashish, Abraaj’s chief financial officer. Sending real bank statements for the healthcare fund to the Gates Foundation wasn’t an option because it would reveal that the money wasn’t where it should have been. Ashish had a better plan. Abraaj could
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that there was a delay in receiving money from the sale of a company, Ashish suggested. Arif agreed. * * * Arif’s tactics weren’t working with the Gates Foundation. Andrew wasn’t satisfied with the answers he was getting and he had talked about his concerns with a few other healthcare fund investors. The
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didn’t have it. Tom Rostand, an official at the French government’s Proparco, got on the case. He emailed Abraaj on behalf of Proparco, the Gates Foundation, and the IFC. He demanded an up-to-date bank statement for the fund and said that unused money should be returned. Sev swatted down
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the request to return the overdrawn funds,” he wrote. Arif forwarded this email, which he described as tetchy and offensive, to Andrew’s boss at the Gates Foundation, Christopher Elias. Arif pointed out that Proparco and the IFC had apologized to him but Andrew had not. “I am quite upset,” Arif wrote. “We
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questions raised her suspicions that something was seriously wrong. Philippe told her to investigate and not to be deterred by Arif’s complaints. Back at the Gates Foundation more executives gathered to discuss how to respond. Arif was a self-proclaimed philanthropist, a signatory of the Giving Pledge, and an important partner in
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him over with flattery. He said that he had closely followed Andrew’s career for a decade and told him he wasn’t surprised when the Gates Foundation promoted him to lead its impact-investing program. He wanted Andrew to call off the investigation by the forensic accountants at Ankura and urged him
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, people confirmed that investors were investigating Abraaj for mismanaging their money but no one was prepared to speak publicly about this. Healthcare fund investors including the Gates Foundation had appointed Ankura, a forensic accounting firm, to investigate what had happened to their money, we were told. Now we had enough information to write
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. Abraaj’s carefully cultivated public image finally cracked at 7:10 p.m. London time on February 2, 2018, when we published an article about the Gates Foundation and other investors hiring an auditor to trace their money. The New York Times published an article soon after. The news articles spread worldwide online
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wrong. CDC executives were deeply troubled by the turn of events because they had so much at stake, with investments in many Abraaj funds, whereas the Gates Foundation had only invested in two funds. If the House of Abraaj collapsed it was going to be an even bigger problem for CDC than for
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the Gates Foundation. The news soon reached the Washington State Investment Board in Olympia, 7,400 miles to the west of Dubai. David Nierenberg, a director of the
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in March 2018. He deflected questions about whether money was missing from more funds and played down the notion that there was a dispute with the Gates Foundation. There was, he said, merely a difference of opinion about whether Abraaj’s agreement with investors permitted him to temporarily move money out of the
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Abraaj’s money as if it was one big pile of cash. There wasn’t any real distinction about where money came from. Cash from the Gates Foundation, the U.S. government, the U.K. government, and Bank of America was mixed up with bank loans and other funds. Then it was paid
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to his brother-in-law Waqar. New lawsuits were still sprouting. Abraaj liquidators sued the $1 billion healthcare fund to claw back $109 million from the Gates Foundation and other investors. Arif had used Hamid Jafar’s loans to replenish the healthcare fund in December 2017, and the liquidators wanted that money back
Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
by Steven Brill · 15 Aug 2011 · 559pp · 161,035 words
that the experiment seemed to be working. The students seemed much more enthusiastic about school, and graduation rates had increased. Melinda was impressed enough that the Gates Foundation staff began planning to direct more investments at the small-school approach. Klein also had been impressed by Bersin’s experiment. Beginning almost from when
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Visions to run them. As she, Klein, and Michelle Cahill, a top Klein deputy, had begun to think about how to expand the project dramatically, the Gates Foundation, which, as in San Diego, had already provided grants to New York City for smaller efforts of this kind, became an obvious focus. That raised
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impressing officials in the Mapleton school district, near Boulder, that they offered him the principal’s job at a more traditional high school. Supported by the Gates Foundation’s small schools initiative that had aided Klein, Mapleton’s two-thousand-student failing high school and middle school had been put in turnaround mode
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had,” Phillips says, “I knew if I didn’t have relentless focus on teaching, I was not going to make progress.” Her first assignment at the Gates Foundation, she says, was “to take a year completely reexamining what education projects the foundation should build on, which ones to stop, and which ones to
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tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses.” The pilot project was being run by Harvard’s Tom Kane, with financing from the Gates Foundation. “If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city—every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say
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a partner with whom she could work: Bill Gates. * * * 1 In the education reform network, there were several muted intrafamily divisions. One involved Rhee and the Gates Foundation. They simply never hit it off. She thought the foundation was too tentative and bureaucratic. The Gates people thought she was too much of a
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Bill Gates had been riveted by his discussion with Kane and Gordon, and following what Kane estimates were hundreds of conversations and multiple trips to the Gates Foundation’s Seattle headquarters (where Kane had become a part-time consultant), Bill and Melinda Gates and the foundation’s senior education staffers, led by Vicki
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Democrats for Education Reform transition memo had recommended Gordon get. Meantime, Gordon had been working on an eerily similar project. He’d been helping with the Gates Foundation’s teacher effectiveness contest, which was about to point the way for much of what Schnur was being asked to come up with using the
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federal purse. The Chosen Four November 19, 2008, Seattle On November 19, 2008, Jean Clements and Hillsborough County officially entered Bill Gates’s orbit, when the Gates Foundation announced that the Hillsborough school system, which is in and around Tampa, had won an “intensive partnership” grant—for $100 million. Jean Clements’s story
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school system, even though they all get to vote on their contract. • • • In February 2008, someone at the AFT in Washington tipped Clements off that the Gates Foundation, aware of her union’s history of collaboration with the school district, was exploring the possibility of including Hillsborough County in some kind of grant
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heard anything more about the contest until April, when district superintendent MaryEllen Elia, who has a close working relationship with Clements, called to say that the Gates Foundation was considering them and forty or fifty other districts around the country as possible recipients of competitive grants. Elia told Clements that a firm condition
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but given up on getting the teachers’ union ever to agree to anything. College-Ready got $60 million. The Pittsburgh school system was lauded in the Gates Foundation announcement for its “collaborative relationship with the teachers union,” a local unit of Weingarten’s AFT. The collaboration had produced a Teacher Effectiveness Reform Plan
…
really did seem to be working collaboratively, they had not yet filled in the important blanks. In addition to announcing these grants totaling $290 million, the Gates Foundation announced that another $45 million would be spent in those locations and in other selected school systems to launch the second stage in Bill Gates
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contest, requiring real plans to win. Look at what Gates had just done, Gordon, added, describing what Pittsburgh, Memphis, and Hillsborough had agreed to in the Gates Foundation competition. Duncan remembered that when the Bush administration had distributed a few competitive grants, he had achieved many years’ worth of reform in a few
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City In June 2009, the New Teacher Project published an explosive report that was the result of a painstaking examination, financed in large part by the Gates Foundation, of the personnel files of twelve school systems of varying sizes across the country, including Denver’s. Titled The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to
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, 2009, a new contract went into effect between the Pittsburgh school system and the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers. It included provisions for everything outlined in the Gates Foundation plan. To be sure, a few of the details still had to be filled in for the performance-based compensation pieces, including, for example, exactly
…
reform network, or those who had consulted for any state or local school systems. That left: • Education foundation staff members, but not at places (like the Gates Foundation) that finance reform projects • Think tank staffers, but not ones who had ever taken positions on the issues involved or were associated with think tanks
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been involved in. She mostly wrote about how collaboration is necessary for reform to work. Bill Gates was so enthusiastic about Waiting for Superman that the Gates Foundation gave a $2 million grant to Participant Media, which, according to the grant document, was meant “to execute a social action campaign that will complement
…
was not alone. In the midst of a discussion a few weeks later with Tom Kane of the Harvard Education School about his work for the Gates Foundation organizing teams of researchers to observe teachers in classrooms in Pittsburgh, Hillsborough County, Memphis, and elsewhere, I asked how long he had been teaching classes
…
child.” When I first met Jean Clements, the union leader in Hillsborough County, Florida, who had fashioned the compromise that had won her school district the Gates Foundation grant, we sat at a table in her office on the ground floor of a housing project the union runs for low-income retirees. The
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epicenter” of reform. He had eased out the incumbent superintendent and brought in John Deasy, a highly regarded reformer who had been deputy director of the Gates Foundation’s education projects and before that superintendent of three different school districts. The mayor was also heavily involved, along with Democrats for Education Reform, in
…
a global talent market, seemed unstoppable. 5 • As with Hillsborough County, in Memphis, Pittsburgh, and the group of charter networks in Los Angeles that won the Gates Foundation teacher effectiveness grants, the promised reforms seemed to be proceeding on schedule. The difference might have been that these districts were chosen more intuitively than
…
allowed the foundation staff to monitor each program closely before checks for additional installments on the grants were written. • In December, Tom Kane, who runs the Gates Foundation’s education research, announced the first results of the foundation’s $45 million effort to have thousands of teachers videotaped in class so that expert
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