The Gates Foundation Is Being The Change On A Global Scale
Subscribe to the Blog RSS FeedThe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is probably doing more to change the world than any organization we know. So it's always inspiring to drop in on all the amazing projects the foundation has launched, as well as listen to what Bill Gates has to say about the year ahead.
In this year's annual letter, Gates talked about how his foundation thinks about innovation, and it is instructive for all of us:
Our framework involves funding a range of ideas with different levels of risk that they could fail. The ones with low risk are where the innovation has been proven at a small scale and the challenge is to scale up the delivery. High-risk innovations require the invention of new tools. Some are at the frontiers of science, such as finding a new drug and running a large trial to see how well it works. Other high-risk efforts involve changing social practices, such as persuading men at risk of getting HIV to get circumcised.
It is critical that we understand in advance what might prevent an innovation from succeeding at scale. For work in developing countries, the lack of skilled workers or electricity might be a key constraint. For work with teachers, we need an approach to measuring their effectiveness that they will welcome as a chance to improve rather than reject because they think it’s more overhead or fear that it might be capricious. Even with the best efforts to make sure we understand the challenges, we need intermediate milestones so we can look at what we have learned about the technology or the delivery constraints and either adjust the design or decide that the project should end. We are focused on strong measurement systems and sharing our results where we have successes but also where we have failures. Innovation proceeds more rapidly when different parties can build on each other’s work and avoid going down the same dead end that others have gone down.
He follows this explanation with a fascinating table of all the foundations programs, broken down by innovation, benefit, time frame, constraints, etc. It's breathtaking in its scope and ambition.
There are some other cool elements on the foundation website that are worth checking out, including this interactive map which details where the Gates Foundation is at work, and what they are up to.
Sometimes photos are the best way to tell a story, so there are lots of powerful images--from health programs in rural Nepal to agriculture development in Kenya. The Daily Beast has assembled some of the best into a slideshow. Just click below to run it!
All this amazing work needs an amazing headquarters, so the Gates Foundation is hard at work on a cutting-edge campus that will open in 2011.
If the scale of the world's problems and challenges seems overwhelming to you, then spending some time on the Gates Foundation website is a great antidote. And we urge you to stay connected via Twitter, Facebook or RSS Feed. And it would be an amazing place to work, so check out the job listings.
