Despite its unprecedented resources, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tends to avoid the broad-based approach of traditional aid programs, putting relatively little money into such popular and immediate causes as job training, road building, schooling African children, easing famines or -- aside from rare cases such as the Thingathingas -- improving housing.
Even in the sphere of global public health, the foundation's top focus, there are many things it avoids in favor of the development of potentially powerful new vaccines and drugs targeting the leading maladies in the poorest parts of the world.
Some of these are well-known -- AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis. Some are obscure -- Guinea worm, trypanosomiasis and cysticercosis, all parasitic diseases. But the more than $5 billion in grants devoted to global health so far reveal a striking faith in the transformative power of new technologies -- a fact perhaps not surprising for a foundation created by Bill Gates, who revolutionized the computing world with a company started in a dorm room.
In explaining why the foundation has not invested heavily in delivering lifesaving antiretroviral drugs for AIDS, for example, Melinda Gates said that only governments have enough money to provide such costly treatments. An exception is Botswana, a sparsely populated country where the Gates Foundation has helped pay for some such drugs.
"Our role has to be a catalyst to get government funding into programs," she said recently during a stop in the tiny southern African country of Lesotho. "We don't begin to have enough money to [buy] antiretrovirals for every person who needs them today in Africa."
[Excerpt of an article by Craig Timberg The Washington Post]
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