Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation Letter

Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation : Why we swing for the fences

Core of foundation works is the idea that every person deserves the chance to live a healthy and productive life.

health and education are key to a healthier, better, and more equal world. Disease is both a symptom and a cause of inequality, while public education is a driver of equality.

philanthropy takes risks that governments can’t and corporations won’t. Governments need to focus most of their resources on scaling proven solutions.

“swing for the fences.”: The goal isn’t just incremental progress. It’s to put the full force of our efforts and resources behind the big bets that, if successful, will save and improve lives.

Global Health

Gavi: Vaccine Alliance

86 percent of children around the world receive basic immunizations. But reaching the last 14 percent is going to be much harder than reaching the first 86 percent.

new organization called the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

across southern and eastern Africa, adolescent girls and young women account for a disproportionate number of new HIV infections. Poverty, violence, and gender norms all play a role in why.

We don’t have a lot of data about what the world looks like through theirs. And that hampers our ability to develop effective solutions for them—biomedical and otherwise.

US Education

there’s no consensus on cause and effect in education. Are charter schools good or bad? Should the school day be shorter or longer? Is this lesson plan for fractions better than that one? Educators haven’t been able to answer those questions with enough certainty to establish clear best practices

Climate

Not having electricity or “energy poverty”—is a real problem for 860 million people around the world.

Paris Agreement and all of the countries, cities, and states that have made bold commitments to zero out emissions by 2050

Mitigation is all about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The key to making that happen is a combination of deploying the things that work now and lots of innovation to create and scale the technologies we still need.

People who will be hardest hit by climate change will be subsistence farmers, who rely on the food they grow to feed their families and already live on the edge of survival

Gender

The data is unequivocal: No matter where in the world you are born, your life will be harder if you are born a girl.

fast-tracking women in leadership positions in critical sectors like government, technology, finance, and health. When more women have a voice in the rooms where decisions are made, more of those decisions will benefit all of us.
bring down the barriers that women of all backgrounds encounter in their everyday lives. For example, the fact that there’s an estimated 27 percent gap in workforce participation between men and women around the world. Or that our economies are built on the back of women’s unpaid labor.
changing society’s norms and expectations