[Anh-Hoa]

ACE oi, I am not sure if this article should be in this section. Please let me know if I should remove it. BUT this is a very awesome article. I like this part very much:
If you took the world and you randomly resorted it so that rich people lived next to people in developing-world conditions, you'd walk down your block and say,"Those people are starving. Did you meet that mother over there? Her child just died. Do you see that guy suffering from malaria? He can't go to work." Basic human instinct would kick in and we would change our priorities.



The way we give
Philanthropy can step in where market forces don't. Using technology to improve people's lives is our aim.

By Bill Gates, Fortune

(Fortune Magazine) -- This essay is adapted from a speech that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates delivered recently at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. Gates received that museum's James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award for his philanthropic work through the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.

I always thought philanthropy was something I would do when I was much older, after I retired. However, as Microsoft became increasingly successful, I realized that the amount of money I would be able to give back to society as I got older was steadily increasing.

One of the people who helped me start to think about how to give back in the smartest way was Warren Buffett. He told me he didn't think it was a good idea to give so much wealth to children, and I agreed with him. Of course, my children weren't old enough to understand the implications and argue against that idea.

I also thought that doing philanthropy and running a company at the same time might make me a little crazy. After all, during the day I'd make money, and then at night I'd go home and give it away. I was worried I'd get confused about which thing I was doing and why.

A charity of one's own

But some things happened that persuaded me to start serious philanthropy. One was working with the United Way. I learned about the United Way when I was young, because my mother was very active in it; she would talk about the campaigns she was running and how the money was being divided up among different organizations. We talked about the tension between local social services and things like disease research. We talked about how much of our allowances we should be giving to the church, to the Salvation Army.

From the very earliest days at Microsoft (Charts), we used our United Way campaign to draw employees together and help them to see outside our world - to see the entire community and understand the needs of the most vulnerable people in it. We wanted to make this outward-looking worldview a part of our culture.

In the last few years, we've developed a tool that helps our employees look for volunteer opportunities and instituted a program that matches their philanthropic giving. Last year, with these matching funds, the people at Microsoft donated more than $68 million and more than 100,000 hours of their own time. Many of the people who have volunteered and made donations have taken on major roles with charitable organizations. In the end, these experiences make them better employees.

Economic inequality

Still, for many years, I thought of myself as focused exclusively on work that would help the business. But one day my wife, Melinda, and I were reading an article about millions of children in poor countries who die from diseases that have been eliminated in this country. These included a disease I'd never even heard of - rotavirus - and the article said rotavirus was killing half a million kids each year. I thought, That can't be right. I read the news all the time. I read about plane crashes and freak accidents. Where is the news about these half-million kids dying?

It's hard to escape the conclusion that in our world, some lives are seen as worth saving, but others are not. And that realization really forced us not only to start our philanthropy earlier but also to make reducing inequity the central priority of our giving.

We want the world to allocate its resources knowing that the death of a child in a poor country is every bit as tragic as that of a child in a rich country. The principle that every human life has equal worth guides us to look for the most effective ways to reduce the suffering that comes as a result of inequality. To us, that means improving economic opportunity and health in developing countries, as well as education in the United States.

Public health is amazing. It's not just about saving lives. As health improves, life improves by every measure. Every other problem you're dealing with - education, transportation - becomes far easier to manage. As you improve health, literacy goes up dramatically, people have smaller families, and all of the factors that drive a stable, prosperous society come together.

When it comes to health, technology is the key to getting us from where we are to where we want to be. Discovery, development, delivery: All of those things take technology. But sometimes, despite our best intentions, just applying technology to problems doesn't fix them.

Meeting human needs

In 1997, I went to South Africa to dedicate a community center in Soweto, one of the poorest parts of the country. Microsoft had given a computer to this community center, and when I was out there they wanted to show me their appreciation. But in the end they unintentionally showed me something else. The community center didn't have electricity, so they had run an extension cord more than 200 yards to a noisy diesel generator. And sure enough, the computer was up and running.

But I knew that the minute the press left and I left, the generator would be used for some more urgent task, the computer would be largely irrelevant to the people who used the community center, and they'd go back to worrying about the very basic challenges they face in their lives - problems that a computer was not going to solve.

So even though PCs and technology can often be part of a solution, we need to remember to put technology in the service of humanity. It's not just taking what we do in the rich world and subsidizing its use in the developing world. Doing that elevates technology as if it were the end goal, but we're just trying to use technology to meet human needs.

Meeting human needs, of course, is the starting point for all philanthropy. The challenge is to do the most you can with your time and money, to take advances in science and learning and make sure they get applied to the most urgent needs.

Philanthropic dollars have the best chance to make a big impact when you find a problem that's been missed and you can gather together unique expertise to formulate a unique approach.

Take malaria, for example. The world has known about malaria for a long time. In the early 1900s, Nobel Prizes were given for advances in understanding the malaria parasite and how it was transmitted. But 100 years later malaria is setting records, infecting more than 400 million people every year, killing over a million people every year. That's more than 2,000 children every day.

In 1999 the Gates Foundation gave $50 million to malaria research, and I was told that we had just doubled the amount of private money going to fight that disease. And I thought, That's the worst thing I've ever heard, that just can't be right.

When you look at all the other causes that generous people give to, why wouldn't stopping this killer have risen to the top? Is it because people thought the science was too difficult? Absolutely not. It's because malaria became a disease that nobody worked on.

Market forces

Technology is often driven by market forces. You develop a technology when there's a buyer for it. Here there was no market for discoveries in fighting malaria, no institution that was charged with filling that vacuum, and so the work simply didn't get done.

This same basic story extends to tuberculosis, yellow fever, acute diarrheal illnesses and respiratory illnesses. Millions of children die from these diseases every year, and yet the advances we have in biology have not been applied, because rich countries don't have these diseases. The private sector hasn't been involved in developing vaccines and medicines for these diseases, because the developing countries can't buy them.

So more than 90 percent of the money devoted to health research is spent on those who are the healthiest. About $1 billion is spent each year to combat baldness. That's great for some people, but if we're setting priorities, perhaps baldness should rank behind malaria.

25 years of AIDS and cure remains elusive

Philanthropy can step in when market forces aren't doing the job. It can draw in experts. It can give awards, it can make novel arrangements with private companies, it can partner with universities. Every year the platform of science that we have to do this on gets better.

Technology is a central focus of our foundation partly because it can help us see what's really going on in the world. Right now we don't make eye contact with the people who are suffering in developing countries.

If you took the world and you randomly resorted it so that rich people lived next to people in developing-world conditions, you'd walk down your block and say, "Those people are starving. Did you meet that mother over there? Her child just died. Do you see that guy suffering from malaria? He can't go to work." Basic human instinct would kick in and we would change our priorities.

Technology can help us see how others are living halfway around the world. In the last few years, for example, some of these inequities have started getting more media coverage. And as people see these problems, they start demanding that something be done about them.

Just as technology allows us to see the world's inequities, it can also help us address them. Technology doesn't have to be complicated or even expensive; in fact, the best technology is often the simplest.

The right technologies

In most cases we're talking about delivering technology in tough conditions - in places where the climate, the lack of electricity, the lack of skilled workers and the lack of transportation make it so that no one will know how to repair the tool if it breaks down, and they won't be able to afford to replace it.

So while the science and engineering that lead to innovations can be very complex, the reality on the ground is that it's got to be very straightforward - very easy to use - and that requires a lot of ingenuity.

A great technology can be the sticker that tells somebody when a vaccine has been compromised by heat and is no longer effective. Heat-sensitive stickers prevent millions of doses of good vaccines from being discarded and millions of doses of spoiled vaccines from being administered futilely.

Technology can also look like a debit card. In Malawi, women have difficulty opening their own bank accounts; many are illiterate and can't sign their names. At the same time, social custom allows in-laws to take possession of a wife's assets if her husband dies, which happens often, of course, because so many are dying of AIDS.

So one of our grantees has a debit card with a fingerprint reader that helps a woman who opens an account prevent others from using it. Thus, it protects her from financial ruin if her husband's family is trying to get those assets. We've heard that women in Malawi are doing a great job letting newlyweds know about this, because it's so empowering.

In areas where there's no infrastructure for banking, we have grantees using satellite technology to help people borrow money, get insurance and deposit their savings.

Technology can also look like a new seed, modified to produce a safer and more nutritious cassava plant. Cassava is a staple food in parts of Africa and South America. It's cheap and abundant and rich in starch and calcium, but it also has toxins, including a precursor of cyanide. People who depend on cassava are at risk of poisoning or undernutrition, and seed technology can make it a safer and a better food.

Technology can look like a water-treatment unit that uses ultraviolet light to kill bacteria, viruses and parasites like cryptosporidium - all sources of some of the diarrheal diseases that kill millions of children. Our foundation is supporting a venture that uses this technology to provide safe drinking water for less than a penny per person a day.

Getting involved

But no foundation alone can solve the health problems of the developing world. We need businesses and governments as partners. That means we need to get these issues on the political agenda, and we need to tap into market forces to get the private sector involved. It means we all need to embrace a broader definition of responsibility.

We must be willing to look at the failure of collective action and see how we can change it. Because these problems are so complex, government has to be involved in solving them.

The Gates Foundation accounts for 1 percent of the giving in America. If we spent all of our endowment on education, it would amount to just half of what the state of California spends on education each year. If we used it to fill the gap between the amount of money that's available for health in developing countries and the amount that's needed, it would barely last one year.

Do the right thing, the right way

But as soon as we say not just that we won't accept these diseases in our neighborhood or in our country, but that we won't accept them in our world, then we start the wheels of collective action turning. We start by giving our governments permission to spend more on these challenges. And that will unleash the potential for sweeping change.

Our foundation has learned a lot since we began our work. One thing I hope more people learn is that giving, meeting smart people, and thinking through these problems can be immensely fun. It's a lot like running a successful company, and it draws on some of the same skills.

It's an incredible privilege, and of course we'll make mistakes, so it's often very humbling as well. Ultimately, solving these problems comes down to all of us. Those of us in the rich world have the chance to improve the lives of billions of people around the world. I can't think of anything that's worth more of our time and effort.

Pro Bono Donations

Before Warren Buffett decided last year to pledge $32 billion of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, guessing what he might do with his money was an intriguing game for many people, philanthropists included. The singer Bono of the band U2, who has worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for several years - and who has a foundation of his own, called DATA (for Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) - recently told Fortune's Andy Serwer during a CNN interview how he learned about Buffett's momentous decision.

I remember meeting Bill Gates, who we couldn't do our work without - Bill and Melinda Gates - and Bill said, "Listen, Bono, don't think you'll ever get a dime out of Warren Buffett. I've tried. Believe me, I've tried. He's too busy, he's too focused on his business, he doesn't have time to be thinking about giving away the money."

So now cut to earlier this year, and all our organization is on a two-day outing in France. There's the DATA people. There's the ONE campaigners. [ONE is a campaign that Bono helped launch to fight AIDS and poverty.] There's Product Red. And after two days, we finish our annual meeting. We're sitting in a restaurant, and the phone rings, and it's Bill Gates. He said, "Are you sitting down?" And I said, "Well, actually I'm just about to. I'm opening a bottle of wine." And he said, "Listen, you need to sit down. I've got somebody who wants to tell you something." So Warren comes on the phone and says [here Bono does a rather good Buffett imitation], "Hi, Bono, uh, listen, uh, you know I got all this money and you know I don't want to spend it, and ..." And I said, "Sorry, Warren?" And he said, "Well, it's about $32 billion." And I said, "Would you mind if I put you on speakerphone?"

So Warren Buffett was talking now to all the people who really do the work. I mean, I'm the rock star, but these are the people who are actually changing the world. And to see their faces as this man gave his life's work to their work, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was quite a remarkable moment. It was the first call that they had made, and I was very touched by that. And Bill Gates, for once, was really wrong.