TODAY has an interesting article - an abridged version of Bill Gates's speech made in June.
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'HOW COULD YOU LET THESE CHILDREN DIE?' (from TODAY, Sat 25 Aug 07)
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Hurdle to changing world is too much complexity, not too little caring
Bill Gates
IMAGINE, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week
and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause - and you wanted to spend
that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and
improving lives. Where would you spend it?
While discussing this, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of
children who were dying every year in poor countries from ... measles,
malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were
dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to
discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under
a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives, that just
weren't being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting to learn
that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to
ourselves: "This can't be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the
priority of our giving."
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked:
"How could the world let these children die?"
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the
lives of these children, and governments did not subsidise it. So the
children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the
market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a
more creative capitalism - if we can stretch the reach of market forces so
that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving
people who are suffering from the worst inequities.
We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in
ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that
generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have
found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.
The task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort
to answer this challenge will change the world.
Sceptics claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us
since the beginning, and will be with us till the end - because people
just ... don't ... care."
I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. The barrier to
change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and
see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a
complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems.
The media covers what's new - and millions of people dying is nothing new.
So it stays in the background. But even when we do see it or read about
it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem.
It's hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we
don't know how to help. And so we look away.
If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the
second step - cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring.
If we have clear and proven answers when an organisation or individual
asks, "How can I help?" - then we can get action, and we can ensure that
none of the caring in the world is wasted.
But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who
cares - and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four
predictable stages - determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach,
discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make
the smartest application of the technology that you already have, whether
it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, such as a
bed net.
The Aids epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end
the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal
technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single
dose. So, governments, drug companies and foundations fund vaccine
research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the
meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand - and the best
prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky
behaviour.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the
pattern.The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working.
The final step - after seeing the problem and finding an approach - is to
measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so
that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show
that a programme is vaccinating millions more children.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more
than numbers - you have to convey the human impact of the work, so people
can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the
impact. And how you do that, is a complex question.
Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new
tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever.
They are new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's
why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the
computer, the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end
extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful
network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses
distance … it also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we
can have working together on the same problem.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this
technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left
out - smart people with relevant experience who don't have the technology
to contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology,
because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings
can do for one another.
Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities.
It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
These are excerpts from a speech which Bill Gates, who dropped out of
Harvard more than 30 years ago to set up Microsoft, gave at the university
in June. He and his wife, Melinda, run a foundation whose key goals
include enhancing healthcare and reducing extreme poverty around the
world.
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