Melinda Gates defines a charity’s mission

‘All lives are equal’
as the basic tenet;
applying analysis

By ROBERT A. GUTH
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
June 5, 2008

HIV-AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, high-school dropouts and global poverty. Those are among the problems that Melinda Gates is battling with the huge fortune her husband Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made in technology.

At an appearance at the D: All Things Digital conference last week in California, Ms. Gates explained how she and her husband define their charitable foundation’s mission. The basic tenet is that “all lives are equal” whether in Boston, Botswana or Bangladesh, she said, eliciting applause from the audience.

She recounted how it was difficult to choose among worthy causes before the couple established their foundation, telling a story about how Mr. Gates once carried around in his briefcase for a month an emotional letter from a U.S. family asking for help for a sick child that needed a kidney. Do you spend $20,000 on a single transplant or buying vaccines for many children in Africa?

Asked what she expected now that her husband was leaving his full-time job at Microsoft, she joked that she never expected to see him walking around their home “with a tool belt.”

Mr. Gates will take a sabbatical in July and August and starting in September he will keep three offices, she said. One will be at Microsoft headquarters where he will likely work one day a week on special projects with Steve Ballmer. He will keep an office at the Gates Foundation, where he will spend one or two days a week. And he will have a third office at a building near their house, where she will also keep an office.

Her appearance at D was an apt symbol for the growing class of people who are applying fortunes made in tech and on the Internet to trying to solve some of the world’s most stubborn problems. The couple manages the largest fund (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has an endowment of $37.3 billion) but others from Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar — who made their money at eBay — to Google founders Larry Page and Serge Brin are all in the game.

These new philanthropists — as you might expect — are trying to apply the same nitty-gritty analysis that many may have used to manage their businesses to difficult-to-measure social problems. “We take a very economic and business approach to what we do,” Ms. Gates said.

Ms. Gates expressed concern with the state of public schools in the U.S. and frustration with teachers’ unions, which she said don’t allow underperforming teachers to be moved out and don’t reward top-performing teachers. However, she said it wasn’t the Gates Foundation’s role to get directly involved in dealing with teacher unions.

Addressing the crowd, Ms. Gates urged the techie attendees to get more involved. “Think about what translates from your business to these problems,” she said. One example: cellphones. Of the 6.6 billion people in the world, 3.7 billion have access to a cellphone, she said. That opens an opportunity to use mobile technology for reworking banking for the poor, she said.

“Technological revolutions or advances — as the price of them really get down — how can we change things for people that live on less than $2 a day?” she asked.

Write to Robert A. Guth at rob.guth@wsj.com

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