Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: how they helped save 122 million lives

David Alayón
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest private charity foundation. It was created in 1994 as the William H. Gates Foundation and later renamed in 1999 as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s headquartered in Seattle, is directed by Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, and has a capital of $34.5 billion.

Its claim is “All lives have equal value. We are impatient optimists working to reduce inequity” and its focus is on three verticals: health, development and growth, always with a global vision and targeted on the most depressed and less developed areas of the world.

  • Ensure more children and young people survive and thrive. We believe the path out of poverty begins when the next generation can access quality healthcare and a great education.
  • Empower the poorest especially women and girls, to transform their lives. We believe that by giving people the tools to lead healthy, productive lives, we can help them lift themselves out of poverty.
  • Combat infectious diseases that particularly affect the poorest. We believe we can save lives by delivering the latest in science and technology to those with the greatest needs.
  • Inspire people to take action to change the world. We know our resources alone are not enough, so we work to change public policies, attitudes, and behaviors to improve lives.

Unlike many initiatives with a futuristic vision that seek to solve the world’s problems, they are not looking for something that could affect only a few people, such as human rejuvenation or enhancement, or leaving Earth to conquer new planets, but rather equality, influencing health, energy, knowledge, access to basic resources… Something that we have talked about a lot in different articles and where the first vision could lead to a dystopia in which wealth is concentrated on fewer and fewer people and the rest is impoverished as a result.

One of the strengths of B&MGF is communication. They are very active in generating content and making visible the impact they generate, something that encourages more and more people to join their cause. You can review all their projects on their website, blog and YouTube profile, or directly on Bill Gates’ channels. There are such powerful examples as the reinvention of the toilet, a video they published 7 years ago that later became the Omniprocessor (which we named in the LifeStraw article) or the Save Lives Vaccines plan (also published 7 years ago) that has managed to reduce infant mortality by half since 1990, its greatest achievement.

“If you look at the decline in child mortality, the acceleration of new vaccines getting out to children like pneumococcus and rotavirus are absolutely responsible for most of that acceleration and so the fact that in 2000 and 2001 we with amazing partners helped create GAVI for vaccines and the Global Fund for HIV, TB and malaria — I don’t think that would have happened without the two lead governments and ours getting behind it.”

“We want to end our letter with the most magical number we know. It’s zero. This is the number we’re striving toward every day at the foundation. Zero malaria. Zero TB. Zero HIV. Zero malnutrition. Zero preventable deaths. Zero difference between the health of a poor kid and every other kid.”

Amazing initiative that bets on one of the best future scenarios that anyone could imagine.

#365daysof #futurism #transhumanism #health #day189

Future Today

High quality curated content and topics related to innovation and futurism along with a little reflection

David Alayón

Written by

Creative Technology Officer & Co-founder @Innuba_es @Mindset_tech · Partner @GuudTV @darwinsnoise · Professor @IEBSchool @DICeducacion · Mentor @ConectorSpain

Future Today

High quality curated content and topics related to innovation and futurism along with a little reflection

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