Melinda Gates

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April 3, 2013 | 11:45 AM | By  | 

Indian slum activists are Revolutionary Optimists at Melinda Gates TED talk | 

ted_talksToday, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was another one of those TED franchise talks.

For this latest spin-off of the popular by-invitation-only main TED talks, this one known as a TEDxChange, Melinda Gates hosted a talk given in Seattle and webcast online on positive disruption – on challenging time-worn assumptions, prompting creative solutions to entrenched problems and inspiring even the most disenfranchised to recognize their personal power.

Speakers included a clever young poet from Nigeria, a theologian who claimed it was progress for the Catholic Church to officially consider the possibility that condoms are not immoral, a social media expert who claimed social media is changing the world, journalist Roger Thurow (an expert on hunger and agriculture in Africa) and an inspiring young woman Melinda met on a trip to Niger.

Like most TED talks, it was fun with a lot of broad and encouraging statements without too many complicating details. The webcast itself was ‘negatively disrupted’ (lots of jokes on Twitter about this) when the TED live stream dropped just as Melinda was making her opening statements. It was restored minutes later.

Of all the featured speakers, there may be no better examples of positive disruptors than 14-year-old Sikha Patra and 15-year-old Salim Shekh, along with their revolutionary Bengali community activist and mentor Amlan Ganguly. Salim and Sikha spoke with Melinda at the event. I talked with them earlier. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Amlan Ganguly, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, India, Melinda Gates, Prayasam, Revolutionary Optimists, TED
July 15, 2012 | 12:29 PM | By  | 

Seattle parties to help ‘Mobile Moms’ in Timor-Leste | 

Melinda Gates was there. Supermodel Christy Turlington was there.

So were a thousand or two others, Seattle’s young humanitarians who started a Saturday evening bash with talks about maternal health but ended it with loud, thumping dance music.

Tom Paulson

Partying for a purpose at Agency 2012

This annual Seattle do-gooder event at McCaw Hall, sponsored by the Washington Global Health Alliance and formerly known as Party With A Purpose, is aimed at raising awareness among young people of critical issues in global health and also raising funds for a specific cause — all combined with some serious partying.

Now called Agency, this year’s event sought to educate the glam crowd of young do-gooders (and a few not-so-glam older folks like me) about the threat of maternal mortality and some of the efforts underway to increase safety of childbirth in poor countries.

The Seattle organization Health Alliance International, which recently launched a Mobile Moms text messaging service aimed at improving maternal health in Timor-Leste, is the beneficiary of the funds raised by the event’s ticket sales (which looked to be at least $40,000. Last year’s fund-raising focus was on the Infectious Disease Research Institute‘s TB work, which raised $34,000).

Tom Paulson

Susan Thompson of HAI's Timor-Leste program

“The idea is to use mobile phones, through text messaging, to get them the information they need for healthy births,” said Susan Thompson, head of the Timor-Leste program for HAI. The long-term goal, Thompson said, is to use this project to further her organization’s broader aim of strengthening the tiny country’s overall health system.

Because of the ubiquity of cell phones in even poor communities (Thompson said they did a survey and discovered 69% of the women had phones, and nearly all texted regularly), the idea is to test in Timor-Leste if reproductive health messaging using text messages sent to pregnant women will improve health outcomes.

“So-called ‘mHealth’ projects are very popular but we need to determine if they really work,” Thompson said.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Agency, Health Alliance International, maternal-mortality, Melinda Gates, Party with a Purpose, Washington Global Health Alliance
July 11, 2012 | 12:17 PM | By  | 

Will Melinda Gates’ family planning boost improve women’s health overall? | 

Analysis

Chris Kleponis, AFP/Getty Images

Melinda Gates

Today, in London, Melinda Gates and a few big guns in the British government did a much-needed and celebrated thing — getting billions of dollars from the international community to fund family planning services for some 120 million women and girls.

The Guardian Rich countries pledge $2.6 billion for family planning in global south

TIME Melinda Gates Launches Global Crusade for Contraception

Yes, this is another one of those promises of foreign aid that rich countries seem to make all the time and then break later when you’re not paying attention. But it’s important to recognize they do keep some of these promises (see funding for AIDS, malaria and child vaccines over the past 10 years) and this one does appear to have momentum.

Improved access to contraception has been estimated to reduce maternal mortality by a third. Providing women with greater control over reproduction is widely regarded as fundamental to empowering women, and as a basic human rights issue. Finally, the public does seem a bit more worried about global population growth these days.

So this campaign — largely led by Melinda Gates, against her church — may indeed represent a significant turning point for family planning and for maternal health worldwide.

But the question some raise, usually those way in the back of the room without access to the microphone or TV cameras, is if this is actually good for women’s health overall. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, contraception, family planning, Melinda Gates, women's health
July 10, 2012 | 11:46 AM | By  | 

Melinda Gates says family planning should not be controversial | 

By Keith Seinfeld, KPLU

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Chris Kleponis, AFP/Getty Images

Melinda Gates

Melinda Gates is promoting access to contraceptives around the world, and urging everyone to believe it’s not a controversial step.

She’s co-hosting a global summit on Wednesday in London, along with the British government.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hopes to overcome religious and cultural resistance by saying birth control is simply one option that women want.

The foundation says simply: “There is no controversy.” And, it has created a website called No-Controversy.com, where women can share stories of how birth control changed their lives.

Enter the Catholic Church

However, when the Catholic Church and some Muslim groups are actively campaigning against it, and when some U.S. states are blocking all funding for Planned Parenthood, saying birth control is not controversial might seem implausible.

Here’s how Melinda Gates explained her position, as a Catholic, on CNN last week:

“To me the contraceptive piece is not controversial. My roots, part of why I do what I do in the foundation, comes from that incredible social justice upbringing I had, this belief that all lives, all lives have equal value.”

Gates made a similar point on the Colbert Report, telling Stephen Colbert, “We’ve made it controversial in the United States, and it doesn’t need to be. In fact 90 percent of Americans say they find contraceptives morally acceptable. But, because we’ve made it controversial, it’s come off the global health agenda.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health, contraception, family planning, maternal-mortality, Melinda Gates
June 29, 2012 | 10:49 AM | By  | 

Melinda Gates on Colbert Report, family planning and ‘going to hell’ | 

Stephen Colbert asks fellow Catholic Melinda Gates how she can support family planning and take the risk of going to hell as well as potentially making the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation into a “slut factory.”

Melinda holds her own, repeatedly refuses to take Colbert’s bait and makes the case for family planning. Here’s more info about the philanthropy’s upcoming events and plans in this arena from the Gates Foundation’s Impatient Optimists blog.

Here’s Geekwire’s take on the humorous interview.

FILED UNDER: Basics, family planning, Melinda Gates, Stephen Colbert
April 9, 2012 | 10:50 AM | By  | 

Did media ignore Melinda Gates’ TED talk on family planning? | 

Chris Kleponis, AFP/Getty Images

Melinda Gates

The data is clear: Improved family planning worldwide could have almost incomprehensible benefits on many fronts:

That last point — about how saving kids’ lives also reduces population growth and increases family incomes — may seem counter-intuitive to some, especially all you Malthusians, but it makes sense of you think about it.

Most poor families have kids to help out on the farm and have, say, ten because five will die. If kids stop dying, families have fewer kids. It’s a documented phenomenon worldwide.

So holy cow! What a three- or four-for-one deal this family planning could be for us!

That was the message Melinda Gates was putting out to the world last week, in a TEDxChange talk as well as through several posts on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s blog Impatient Optimists.

Yet it appears hardly anybody in the media paid much attention.

AllAfrica.com ran an op-ed from Melinda and my former Seattle PI colleague Joel Connelly wrote about it as well — from the perspective of a devout Catholic (like Melinda) who thinks his church is missing the boat when it comes to contraception and family planning.

The aid and development blogosphere also covered Gates’ talk, such as at UN Dispatch — which noted how poorly the international community is doing on this front — and the PSI blog Healthy Lives. I watched the TED talk but didn’t write about it. Mea culpa. But I have written about Melinda’s message on this front many times before.

I’m curious to know if, as it appears by doing a Google news search, the mainstream media almost totally ignored the talk. And why?

FILED UNDER: Basics, family planning, Melinda Gates, TED
September 23, 2011 | 7:47 AM | By  | 

Now following Melinda’s Tweets, but who do Bill and Melinda Gates follow? | 

photo by Chris Bennion

A Twitter Symphony, from the play The New New News

Like tens of thousands of folks (soon to be millions), I now follow Melinda Gates on Twitter. I also follow her husband’s Tweets.

I couldn’t help wondering if they followed me on Twitter, since I write about them and their philanthropy so often. Nope, not so far. Dang, that could have boosted my numbers ….

Bill Gates also just signed up to follow Melinda’s Tweets. Bill says on Twitter that he follows 72 people and organizations. I suspect he doesn’t really follow some of those on his list, such as American Idol host Ryan Seacrest or Ashley Tisdale (I don’t know who she is but her website describes her as “one of Hollywood’s most sought after young talents.”).

Melinda has already topped Bill by following 121 people. Melinda, like Bill, follows mostly global health, social justice and development organizations. But she does follow a few media organizations, journalists and a smattering of celebrities like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and those involved in championing causes (Lance Armstrong, Christy Turlington).

What does my analysis of the Twitter-following selections of the world’s richest couple mean?

I don’t know.

FILED UNDER: Basics, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Twitter
May 23, 2011 | 9:43 AM | By  | 

Gates Foundation’s new digs soon to officially open | 

The Seattle Times, and reporter Kristi Heim, on Sunday published a big spread on the new headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set to officially open in early June.

As is often the case in restaurants, where the appetizers are better than the main entrees, I think the most interesting story in this package is the sidebar with the terribly dull headline Bill and Melinda Gates: Adjoining offices, contrasting styles.

“We’re constantly in learning mode, but learning from different directions and nudging each other,” Melinda Gates said. She explained that she works from observing what people need and then goes to the statistics while her husband prefers to start with statistics and then move to examining the human factors.

I got a sneak peak at this spectacular campus in April when I attended an event at which Bill and Melinda Gates honored two other Bills — Bill Foege and Bill Gates Sr – for their guidance in making the philanthropy what it is today. Here’s a photo of Bill Gates and Foege in the main commons room:

Tom Paulson

Bill Gates and Bill Foege, at new campus

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Foege, Bill Gates Sr., Melinda Gates, new campus