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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Bill Gates talks metrics and spills the beans on his annual letter |

On Wednesday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will officially release Bill’s annual letter.

You can sign up here to get it yourself, or just read the Wall Street Journal op-ed published last week in which he pretty much says the same thing:

“In the past year, I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal.”

No surprise here. But there’s measurement and then there is evaluation. They aren’t always the same thing. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, annual letter, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, metrics

January 11, 2013 | 1:24 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Three years later: Was the massive humanitarian response in Haiti a success? |

Co-authored by Tom Murphy

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: Immediately after the 2010 quake, many Haitians were given tents as ‘temporary’ shelters. Three years later, nearly 400,000 still live in them. UNDP

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The international community’s response to the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the largest disaster relief responses ever carried out involving many governments, agencies, hundreds of humanitarian organizations and about $9 billion in private donations and foreign government assistance.

So it may be a bit disconcerting that, three years on, the aid and development community still can’t seem to agree on whether the effort should be regarded as largely a success or a failure.

“There are still something like 360,000 people living in tents,” said Nicole Phillips, a human rights attorney with the Institute for Justice and Democracy and Haiti. Philips is speaking today at the University of Washington along with documentary filmmaker Michele Mitchell who is screening her film Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? – a critical analysis of the lack of accountability within the humanitarian community.

: Vijaya Ramachandran

Other aid experts, like Vijaya Ramachandran at the prestigious DC-based think tank the Center for Global Development, have asked the same question. As Ramachandran wrote last spring:

The Government of Haiti has received just 1 percent of humanitarian aid and somewhere between 15 and 21 percent of longer-term relief aid. As a result, NGOs and private contractors in Haiti have built an extensive infrastructure for the provision of social services. Yet, these entities appear to have limited accountability….

But many of those who actually do the work there say this alleged lack of adequate financial accountability doesn’t necessarily mean Haitians did not benefit, that lives were not saved and that many millions of people’s lives have been improved.

“There’s a reason it’s called a disaster,” said Jeff Wright, emergency operations manager for World Vision and a disaster relief worker with lots of experience in Haiti. These situations are always chaotic and hardly ideal for precise bookkeeping, Wright said, adding that Haiti was chaotic and difficult before the quake.

“Are things in Haiti good today? No. Are they better than they would have been had we not responded? Absolutely.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Justice, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, cholera, disaster relief, foreign aid, Global Partnerships, Haiti, Mercy Corps, UN, World Vision

November 9, 2012 | 1:20 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Gates-funded ‘breakthrough’ malaria vaccine now disappoints |

Photo by Caitlin Kleiboer

Testing the RTS/S malaria vaccine in Malawi

The world’s largest clinical trial of an experimental malaria vaccine, largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline, has produced disappointing results – again.

It shouldn’t be too surprising.

The study has been producing the same disappointing results for many years now. It’s just been emphasized as progress before, with those supporting the work at the Gates Foundation and at the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative usually characterizing the vaccine’s protection rate of about 30 percent as proof of concept or as an encouraging step forward.

For example, here’s a Google News shot of how last year’s similar findings — of 30 percent protection — were characterized in the media:

Google News on the malaria vaccine

These stories were over-the-top, so I felt compelled to write Three Reasons Why We Should Not Get So Excited.

On the flip side of that coin, maybe we shouldn’t be too disappointed now. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Science, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, malaria vaccine, PATH

November 1, 2012 | 3:09 PM | By Tom Paulson |

A chat with NY Times’ David Bornstein about ‘solutions’ journalism |

Abigail Gampel

David Bornstein

David Bornstein is what many would consider a rare bird — an optimistic and forward-looking journalist.

Bornstein is also one of my favorite writers on aid and development issues, for the New York Times Opinionator column and as an author of a number of important books including one on the anti-poverty scheme known as microfinance, The Price of a Dream, and his more recent book How to Change the World, a look at the social enterprise movement.

On Thursday, it was announced that Bornstein and his NYTimes colleague Tina Rosenberg were among the winners of 90 new grants, each of which starts out at $100,000, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations program.

That wasn’t quite right: Bornstein later responded, after the awards were announced, that he and Rosenberg will not receive any of the grant money and are only collaborating on the Gates-funded project at Marquette University.

“We are cooperating with Marquette. But they prepared the proposal and they will be doing all the work and receiving the full grant.”

Here’s what the Gates Foundation said in announcing the grant winner: “The Institute for Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, USA, will partner with David Bornstein (How to Change the World) and Tina Rosenberg (Pulitzer prize-winning The Haunted Land) to build the first Wiki-style platform that packages solutions-journalism (specifically NYTimes Fixes columns) into mini-case-studies for educators around the world to embed in, and across, the curriculum.”

I missed the nuance there. Sorry about that.

Bornstein, who contacted me after this post was published, said the NY Times prohibits them from accepting grant money (for work done at NYTimes) and they are unpaid collaborators with Marquette, allowing them to repurpose their columns and to help them think through the process.

The Grand Challenges Exploration program was created by the Gates Foundation mostly to fund ‘wacky’ (aka high risk) scientific projects and that’s mostly still what it has supported among its 800 projects funded to date.

Gates Foundation

One example pictured at right: Agenor Mafra-Neto and his colleagues are building inexpensive laser bug sensors that accurately count and identify flying insect pests from a distance. Because it’s always good to know exactly how many and which types of bugs there are.

Anyway, you can read more about the latest round of wacky scientific winners at the philanthropy’s website.

I’m going to focus on Bornstein, as an example of how the Grand Challenges initiative has expanded its scope to include funding communications efforts that show “Aid is Working.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, advocacy, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, David Bornstein, foreign aid, Grand Challenges, journalism, social enterprise

October 9, 2012 | 12:48 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Uganda’s Health Minister on malaria, corruption and collaboration |

Tom Paulson

Ugandan officials Tim Lwanga and Christine Ondoa on Seattle visit

Uganda’s been in the news a lot lately:

An outbreak of deadly Ebola (now declared over).
The country’s celebration of its 50th anniversary of gaining independence from Britain (along with the perhaps less-celebrated 26th anniversary of President Yoweri Museveni’s refusal to relinquish power).
The next phase of the bizarre “social-mediated” hunt for Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.
Uganda’s crackdown on the ‘crime of homosexuality.’
An update on the corruption probe, started in 2009, of the country’s mismanagement of foreign money donated to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

So, you can imagine, I had a lot of questions for Uganda’s Minister of Health Christine Ondoa, a pediatrician and pastor, and one of her traveling companions, Ugandan Parliamentarian Tim Lwanga. Ondoa has been in Seattle for the last few days to meet with a number of local organizations, talking about collaborating on projects aimed at improving health in the poor East African nation.

“The main challenges are the infectious and communicable diseases, especially malaria,” said Ondoa, who while in town met with folks at Gates Foundation, PATH, World Vision and also at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to discuss the Seattle cancer center’s ongoing project with the Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala.

(I suspect the Fred Hutch folks might chafe at the claim malaria is Uganda’s biggest health problem. The cancer community is part of a broader campaign out there contending non-communicable diseases like cancer deserve equal attention in Uganda. As my friend and local journalist colleague Joanne Silberner has reported, cancer kills more people than HIV, TB and malaria combined.)

Uganda has all of the typical health problems of a poor African country, but Ondoa says malaria does deserve special attention Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, cancer, Christine Ondoa, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, malaria, PATH, Pilgrim Africa, Tim Lwanga, Uganda, World Vision

October 8, 2012 | 1:29 PM | By Tom Paulson |

Point of clarification on 5 key points from Gates Foundation 2012 report |

Tom Paulson

Last week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation release its annual report and I did a quick analysis of it, which I dubbed the Top Five Points. I selected five things from the annual report which caught my attention, one of which made some folks at the philanthropy unhappy.

That was point 3:

There’s nothing in this annual letter (or in Raikes’ new blog post) following up on what has been a chronic complaint about the Gates Foundation — it’s lack of transparency and relatively poor communication skills with grant recipients and outsiders. Last year, Raikes addressed this complaint head-on and said they intended to improve. Does anybody know what happened? Did I miss something?

Well, I did miss something. My words are factually correct — in that this chronic problem was not mentioned in the annual report. But I did, in fact, neglect to mention a number of efforts underway by the Seattle philanthropy to improve its communications with grant recipients and the outside community. I neglected them because I didn’t know about them. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, annual report, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, communication, grantees, Jeff Raikes, transparency

October 4, 2012 | 11:30 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Seattle talk: Philanthro-capitalism and the politics behind the global health agenda |

On Friday, 3:30-6 pm, UW Health Sciences Hogness Auditorium, historian Anne-Emanuelle Birn gave the Stephen Stewart Gloyd endowed lecture, “Philanthrocapitalism, Cooption and the Politics of Global Health Agenda-Setting.”

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The words “global health” usually conjure images of health workers vaccinating children in Africa, major initiatives aimed at getting anti-HIV drugs or anti-malaria bed nets out to people in poor communities across the globe or any number of other noble efforts aimed at fighting diseases of poverty.

Most don’t think of global health as a means to also advance corporate or political agendas.

Anne-Emanuelle Birn

But Anne-Emanuelle Birn does and on Friday, at a UW symposium, she explained why.

Birn’s a historian who literally wrote the book on global health! (Well, okay, she’s first author on the 3rd edition of it … known as the Textbook of International Health). The popular narrative of global health, she says, is too often a simplistic portrayal of the field as a charitable enterprise largely devoid of political and economic power or social conflict.

“There’s an incredible amount of naivete and lack of knowledge about all this,” said Birn. “To begin with, it’s important to recognize that philanthropy emerged in the United States in the early 20th century as an alternative to the welfare state.”

That’s important, she explained, because it provides a lens through which to evaluate the strategies and choices made by philanthropists to advance their goals. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, global health, philanthropy, politics, Rockefeller Foundation, University of Washington

October 4, 2012 | 10:35 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Top 5 points in Gates Foundation annual report |

Tom Paulson

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today published its 2011 annual report. Yes, I know it’s almost 2013. But they’ve been going through some big internal changes and all these annual reports are issued after-the-fact.

On a quick read upon its release today, I’d say here are five main takeaways from the report:

1. The Gates Foundation has recently undergone a major reorganization of its global programs in which a number of projects previously housed under global health (maternal and child health, family planning, polio) are now to be administered under the development program.

Chris Elias, former president at PATH, now runs the development program and Trevor Mundel, a top drug development expert formerly at Novartis, runs a more narrowly focused global health program. I’ll write more about that later.

2. Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes is going to start a new blog (first post here).

Gates Foundation
Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes

Raikes says he is doing this because “We need to go beyond partners to the critics and dissenters of our approaches. In philanthropy we don’t have competitors but we do have critics. Competition and critics are good. They help us make the right choices. They test our conviction.”

3. There’s nothing in this annual letter (or in Raikes’ new blog post) following up on what has been a chronic complaint about the Gates Foundation — it’s lack of transparency and relatively poor communication skills with grant recipients and outsiders. Last year, Raikes addressed this complaint head-on and said they intended to improve. Does anybody know what happened? Did I miss something? (I did — see my follow-up post and clarification.)

The foundation did do a conference call later with grantees to see what they should do to improve communications. As I noted in the post about this event, many of those both inside and outside agree that this has been a serious problem — so bad that they even resorted to reading my smart-ass Humanosphere post to the entire staff.

4. Raikes’ visit to Ethiopia provides, in the annual report, an example of why the Gates Foundation reorganized. One of the primary goals of the reorganization of its approach to fighting global poverty and disease, Raikes said, was to move away from a “siloed” approach to solving problems and toward a more integrated approach. The needs of poor people are not compartmentalized, he said, and solutions can’t be either:

Historically, our focus on solving specific problems has often prevented us from stepping back and looking at the interrelationships among these issues to develop more holistic solutions.

5. The philanthropy in 2011 looks to have significantly increased its funding of media organizations (from zero reported funds in 2010 to $18 million in 2011). But it’s not immediately clear what happened in terms of their funding “strategic media partnerships” because of a shift to consolidate this practice into a single program rather than do media funding for particular program areas.

On their website link to annual report, this screenshot below showing program areas is interactive and you can get a bit more specific information scrolling over it or clicking on topics. The biggest piece of the funding pie (light brown) is global health:

Gates Foundation

Gates Foundation funding by program area, comparison 2011 to 2010