The bill gates problem, p.28
The Bill Gates Problem, page 28
What this funding model suggests is that the foundation does not trust poor people to manage its money well. It also clearly shows that the foundation does not aim to build up the expertise and capacity of poor nations. It offers a long view of the world in which the poor will always be poor—and dependent on the goodwill of global elites.
Beyond the moral obliquities in this colonial mind-set, the Gates Foundation’s giving should also raise dollars-and-cents questions. When Gates funds wealthy organizations in rich nations, this means an enormous percentage of its charitable dollars gets eaten up by administrative costs—high-paid white-collar workers in fancy office buildings in expensive cities like Washington, DC, and Geneva. Researchers describe this black hole of spending as “phantom aid.” More perversely, the foundation’s extravagant funding could be seen as disincentivizing success; Gates’s charitable partners know that if they solve a problem, or effectively hand over solutions to the poor, they will lose out on big contracts from the foundation.
Even in places where the foundation is making donations to poor nations, there is often more to the story. The foundation’s single largest investment in Africa has gone to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA—the recipient of more than $675 million from Gates. This money represents close to 15 percent of all giving Gates reports going to the continent—yet, as described later in this book, AGRA is not an exclusively African organization. Gates and other Western donors conceived of, fund, and help manage the project.
As another example, EthioChicken has become one of the largest poultry companies in Ethiopia, thanks in part to millions of dollars in charitable giving from the Gates Foundation. The company was founded by an American businessman in partnership with a McKinsey consultant.
Gates’s grant records show hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to groups with the word Africa in their name that are based outside the African continent—like the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (based in New York), the East African Center for the Empowerment of Women and Children (Virginia), the African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership (New Jersey), and the Made in Africa Initiative (Hong Kong).
Philanthropist Peter Buffett (son of Warren) has described this model of charity as “philanthropic colonialism.” “People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem,” Buffett wrote in 2013.
Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising.
Calling it “conscience cleansing,” Buffett diagnoses the colonial lens embedded in philanthropy as destructive and manipulative: “The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over.”
There’s plenty of room to criticize Buffett’s own colonial lens—critics say his philanthropy, the NoVo Foundation, has effectively colonized a small town in upstate New York, creating widespread dependence on his charitable grants, locally known as “Buffett Bucks.” (A request for an interview with Peter Buffett generated no response.) But Buffett at least has some capacity to engage publicly with criticism, which is not something that can be said for the Gates Foundation. While we should not doubt that Bill Gates really believes he is helping the poor, we also cannot excuse or ignore the obviously colonial mind-set he brings to this work.
“When you go into a poor country, you want to fix health, you want to fix agriculture, you want to fix education, you want to fix governance,” Gates explained in a 2013 keynote speech at Microsoft. “And it’s the magic blend of those things, all of which reinforce each other.”
“There’s about a third of the world lives in countries where these things haven’t come together,” Gates continued. “It’s clear that innovation, particularly technical innovation—new vaccines, new seeds, monitoring things to make sure government workers do what they’re supposed to do, including in education, that we can make much faster progress to get these people out these poverty traps now than ever before.”
Here, Bill Gates seems to be owning his position in the world as a kind of extralegal overlord, a supra-governor engaged in nation building, if not world making—shaping the policies, rules, and regulations that guide how poor people grow food, treat their sick, and educate their children and then carefully “monitoring” the nincompoop bureaucrats to make sure they complete the tasks Gates has assigned them.
“We’ve always wanted to have a robot that can go out in rural areas and help out in certain health care–type things … say, to help do a C-section in a rural area where that absolutely needs to be done,” Gates said. “So, I don’t think that’s in the next ten years, but maybe in the next twenty or thirty. That kind of physical expertise can be made available very, very broadly.”
It’s a dim view of the future, one that speaks to the material limits of Gates’s vision and of his “technology will save us” dogma. Gates cannot imagine a world in which poor nations have their own health professionals performing C-sections. And decades from now, he sees a world in which the poor still cannot care for themselves but in which they will have much improved lives via the patented bot surgeons he will import from Silicon Valley.
“They really epitomize a form of charity which is disempowering to the people that they claim to seek to benefit,” David McCoy, a physician and researcher at United Nations University in Malaysia, told me. McCoy identified the foundation’s funding bias toward rich nations as far back as 2009, and, in the decade since, he said, he’s seen the foundation only solidify its position of privilege and expand the asymmetries of power that govern global health. “It comes back to this issue of power,” he went on. “At the end of the day, a really good metric … to look at is: Has power been redistributed over the last twenty years since the Gates Foundation has been on the scene? And I think the evidence shows it hasn’t. If anything, inequality, in terms of power, [has] actually gotten worse. There’s been an even greater concentration of power and wealth in a few hands, even if lives have been saved during that time. By continuing to not address the more fundamental problems of structural inequality, and the injustice of that, they are able to maintain this position of being charitable and benevolent, which they are then able to translate, to turn into social power.”
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IT’S DIFFICULT TO examine the colonial mind-set driving the Gates Foundation’s work without interrogating the racial dynamics embedded in it. Virtually everywhere the foundation works, whether in the United States or abroad, its focus is on poor people who look nothing like Bill and Melinda French Gates and who live categorically different lives. Though institutional racism at the foundation remains virtually unexamined by researchers and reporters, in recent years, the foundation has nevertheless faced a growing body of public allegations.
Daniel Kamanga, cofounder of Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International—one of the Gates Foundation’s earliest and best-funded agricultural projects—penned an essay on LinkedIn about the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck until the life was taken from him. For Kamanga, the atrocity brought to mind the racism he experienced working with Western donors. “I felt the full weight of the knee of racism engaging with donor organizations. I almost couldn’t breathe during numerous engagements with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I have heard knee-on-neck stories from many African NGOs dependent on US, European and other donors. Some African NGOs mastered the game and bracketed the pain. Some became stooges of ‘the Enemy.’ Many of those who stood [up] to the donors are dead, killed by the weight of those pretending to support them.”
In 2021, the Gates Foundation drew controversy upon revelations that its money manager faced accusations of racist behavior, alongside allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct. The money manager denied or downplayed the allegations, and the foundation allowed him to keep his job. A year earlier, the director of the Gates-funded Stop TB Partnership, Lucica Ditiu, faced high-profile accusations of racism. After the allegations became public, the Gates Foundation made a new, $2.5 million donation to support Stop TB’s work, where Ditiu remains in charge. And the foundation continued to sit on the group’s board of directors, represented by Gates Foundation staffer Erika Arthun.
“Gates sits on the Stop TB board and did nothing,” one former employee, Colleen Daniels, told me, noting that she had directly emailed the Gates Foundation about internal problems. “Really what Gates showed me is they are willing to sacrifice people of color to maintain their own agenda.
“The biggest issue for me is Gates has really taken over global public health. They’re defining the priorities, and they have done for at least fifteen years. I used to work at the World Health Organization and different UN agencies, and all of the agendas come out of what Gates wants them to focus on, because that’s where the money comes from,” Daniels notes. “The influence of Gates is too far-reaching. It’s just another form of colonialism.”
Julia Feliz recounts experiencing suffocating racism through their participation in a fellowship at the Alliance for Science, a Gates-funded, Gates-founded project designed to advance the foundation’s agenda on GMOs. Feliz, who is Puerto Rican, called the fellowship a “lesson in Neocolonialism.”
When Feliz challenged this racism, the program forced them out of the fellowship, sparking political activity across Cornell University, where the project was hosted at the time. A resolution issued by the school’s student governance body condemned the Alliance’s behavior. “Rather than ‘science communication,’ it was a training in sharing our deepest, most personal trauma, unrelated to GMOs—almost like poverty porn (filmed on video!) to pass around in an effort to convince people that looked like ‘us’ to accept GMOs while also showing white people ‘See, we’re Black, and we want this,’” Feliz told me via email.
“It was a training in exploiting our most private struggles to further neocolonialism regardless of the history, colonialism, and power over the Global South. The program was definitely not about honest and real conversations about GMOs and the issues around them.… In summary, I went to Cornell for intellectual discourse and instead, walked away realizing my skin color and private heart wrenching struggles were worth more than my individuality, abilities, achievements, or experience to a program furthering the exploitative system that only benefits those already in power.”
The Gates Foundation appears to use this model widely, funding Black and brown “champions” and “storytellers” for the explicit purpose of amplifying its own agenda and creating the appearance of robust, diverse support for its work. The Gates-funded Generation Africa Voices project partners with the media giant Thomson Reuters to train African storytellers to “become champions for global development.” The invited fellows each have their own webpage and “media pack,” which includes a photo and a profile that appear ready-made to give journalists easy access to real, authentic African misery—whether it’s having been a child soldier for the Lord’s Resistance Army, or being set on fire by a stepmother, or having pursued an unsafe abortion through overdose of a chemical.
Many readers have probably heard episodes of the famed Moth Radio Hour broadcast over their local NPR station, but they probably don’t know that the program has received $7.6 million from Gates “to help champions from the economically developing world craft first-person stories and share them with both decision-makers and a mass audience.” A senior Gates Foundation executive sits on the Moth’s board of directors, and the foundation reports collaborating with the group on polio eradication.“To change hearts and minds, we need good stories,” the Gates Foundation reports. The Moth works hand in hand with the Gates-funded Aspen Institute’s New Voices Fellowship, which seeks to elevate these voices in the news. The group boasts having produced nearly 2,000 public op-eds from its 189 fellows.
Another Gates-funded project, Speak Up Africa, claims to be organized, as its name suggests, around empowering and strengthening African democratic engagement. The Gates Foundation has given at least $45 million to the group, and the foundation holds a seat on its board. Gates’s first charitable grants to the group didn’t go to Africa, however. They went to New York City—to the twenty-fourth floor of the Trump Building in Manhattan, the location of the group’s offices, according to Speak Up Africa’s annual tax filing. (Later donations were reported as going to Senegal.) In practice, Speak Up Africa appears to use its voice to raise the volume of its benefactor’s agenda, not local perspectives. The Economist highlighted the group’s work in Dakar, for example, where the foundation has introduced a new, and apparently controversial, high-tech sewage treatment plant. “Shortly after the machine appeared, rumours that water extracted from sewage was being added to the city’s drinking water caused uproar,” the Economist reported. “Speak Up Africa, a Gates-funded policy-and-advocacy group, was called on to launch a public-information campaign.… The team says its monthly virtual meetings with Gates staff in Seattle offer a chance to discuss new ideas and meet international experts.” (Questions emailed to Speak Up Africa’s offices in New York and Senegal did not get a response.)
By elevating “champions” and “storytellers” and “fellows” who agree with and amplify Gates’s agenda and worldview, or who won’t challenge it, the foundation can give its work the appearance of great diversity, equity, and inclusion. But it is difficult to avoid seeing these efforts as deeply tokenistic and disrespectful. The simple fact is that the foundation spends far more resources trying to capture images of the global poor, capitalize on their stories, and co-opt their misery than it does actually listening to or working with them.
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THE GATES FOUNDATION is not a particularly diverse workplace. Gates reported in 2021, for example, that only around 10 percent of its U.S.-based workforce is Black or Hispanic—compared to around 33 percent of the U.S. population.
Diversity at the Gates Foundation should probably be understood more broadly than in terms of race and ethnicity, however. How many people who work at the foundation have the lived experience of poverty or have grown up in the poor nations where so much of the foundation’s work takes place? And how many staff grew up in wealthy families in rich nations—and attended Ivy League schools? How many staff have been schoolteachers or farmers—whose lives and livelihoods the foundation heavily influences through its charitable giving?
The foundation doesn’t report this information, but we can see at least some level of diversity in its leadership. This includes Anita Zaidi, who appears to be the highest-ranking foundation official who is a person of color from a poor nation. A decorated physician from Pakistan, Zaidi has served as director of the foundation’s vaccine development and surveillance, director of its work on enteric and diarrheal diseases, and also president of its work on gender equality. Project Syndicate calls her “one of the world’s leading voices on issues affecting women and girls.”
It’s a questionable assertion from a dubious source—the Project Syndicate article does not disclose the news outlet takes funding from the Gates Foundation. There is, nevertheless, some truth to the idea that Zaidi plays several very high-profile roles at one of the most powerful political organizations in the world.
Though Zaidi works from the foundation’s headquarters in Seattle, and is also a Harvard-trained scientist, her ties to Pakistan give her perspective on how the Gates Foundation works in poor nations, a topic she doesn’t shy away from in interviews. Once asked about criticism that not enough foundation funding was going into “capacity development” in poor nations, Zaidi responded, “At the BMGF we look very carefully at how much of the grants that we are funding are going to low and middle income countries and how much to partnering US/western institutions.” She went on to give several nonspecific examples, like “a program in India which was [in] clinical trial capacity development,” but none from her home country of Pakistan. As it turns out, much of the foundation’s funding to the country—five hundred million dollars in total—appears to have gone to organizations that Zaidi herself runs or to which she has close institutional ties.
Before joining the foundation, Zaidi served as chair of the pediatrics department at Aga Khan University. AKU today is the second-largest recipient of Gates’s funding in Pakistan, taking in well over $100 million, much of it directed at child and maternal health. Zaidi continues to hold a part-time faculty position at the school and has continued to publish some of her scientific research under her AKU affiliation. She also personally makes high-profile donations to the school—something she can afford to do with her nearly $750,000 compensation package from the Gates Foundation. Sources say she remains a powerful institutional force inside Aga Khan through her work with one of the school’s most potent external funders.
Another top recipient of Gates Foundation funding is Vital Pakistan Trust, which Zaidi founded and where she served as chair of the board of trustees as late as mid-2022. The group has received more than $33 million from the Gates Foundation for work related to child and maternal health. This appears to be virtually all of Vital Pakistan’s funding, and some of this funding appears to have been spent on collaborative projects with AKU. Likewise, many members of Vital’s board of trustees have historically come from AKU.
These relationships raise clear questions about financial conflicts of interest. Zaidi works for the Gates Foundation, which is donating tens of millions of dollars to an organization she was running, Vital Pakistan. At the same time, the Gates Foundation is also donating more than one hundred million dollars to a university where Zaidi plays a powerful institutional role. How can the foundation donate money to organizations that Gates Foundation staff help direct or where they play influential roles? At what point do we see this as charity, and at what point do we see the Gates Foundation, essentially, just giving money to itself?
