Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and built the company into a technology empire that has shaped the world as we know it today. But Gates stepped away from the company 10 years ago to take on a new challenge: ridding the world of infectious diseases through the philanthropic endeavours of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He's also vowed to give away the majority of his wealth in a philanthropic effort dubbed The Giving Pledge.
In a wide-ranging interview with CTV National News Chief Anchor and Senior Editor Lisa LaFlamme, Gates spoke about the challenges of achieving eradication, his efforts to encourage the world’s richest to help the world’s poorest, and his thoughts on Donald Trump.
The following is a transcript of a 20-minute interview with Gates in Seattle, slightly abridged and edited for clarity and brevity.
Bill Gates: We really have to work hard to remind people even though this is far away, that's it's probably the most generous thing governments have ever come together to do. Since World War II, this new institution is the only one that's emerged and is saving all these lives. When AIDS emergency broke out and was killing millions in Africa, the Global Fund was created so that a level of generosity would show up and buy the medicines to save those lives.
Lisa LaFlamme: By 2030, you want to end TB, malaria and AIDS. Is it realistic?
Gates: We won't be to absolutely zero on all three by then, but we should be way down. AIDS we're – most of these diseases – we are down from the peak. We're down about 40 per cent from the peak and if we got the right vaccines, which are at the early stage of discovering, then the numbers would come down very dramatically. So that's why we talk about it as an emergency. It's not a short-term emergency but it is something that, just like smallpox was many decades ago, we should aim for complete eradication.
Is it getting easier or more difficult to convince governments that this is something – and private – that they should be a part of? For the global good.
Gates: Well the Global Fund, because of how well it's worked on not only AIDS, but also malaria and tuberculosis, I’d say it's well accepted. I mean, it's not politically controversial that this is a great humanitarian effort. But budgets are very very tight. You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs. Every three years, we have to go to the governments and say, okay, you know you're saving millions of lives and even though your budgets are tight, helping Africa avoid this disaster really is a priority.
----
How do you monitor, first of all, that the money goes where it is intended to go and accomplishes the good it's intended to accomplish, and in working with some governments that may not have the best motives in mind, in some of these African nations?
Gates: Well depending on the government, you either work through the government, which is ideal, because then you're strengthening their capabilities, or you work through the non-governmental organizations. It’s never easy, and you know, it's just about the very basics of health. This is not hospitals. This is just primary health care, the most simple things, and even so, getting the supplies out, getting the trained workers there. Even when things are stable, that's not easy because there are not roads, and the weather is tough, the education system hasn't been there. But this is how you get great countries, is step by step.
Let's talk about Nigeria for a second because certainly as a result of Boko Haram, there's mass famine going on. One hundred-and-thirty kids a day dying from famine and now we see a resurgence of some cases of polio. How do you process that kind of a setback and the inability to access those kids in those regions because of something like a terrorist organization?
Gates: Yes, it's horrific. Whenever you have war, you often have more deaths because the medical system and the food system breaks down, than you have directly through violence. So it's women and children who are actually suffering in many of these cases, including in northern Nigeria right now. There are a lot of camps. We’ve got to make sure we're getting food and medicine into those camps. With polio, we've gone several years with no polio in all of Africa, but now with this we're having to go and mop up in that whole region, so it's a bit of a setback for polio. So in parallel we have to go back and get rid of those cases. At the same time, we have two other countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan – again it's the instability that is a problem there. So over the next several years, we expect to drive the number of cases back down to zero because that is likely to be the second disease after smallpox that we completely eradicate.
When we pull in here today and see the bricks and mortar of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it’s such a known brand, but I'm not sure a lot of people really recognize the amount of on-the-ground work that you personally do. How important is it for you to get to these places, to see these young people and to see the progress that you've been so instrumental in doing?
Gates: Well going out in the field, it's always enlightening to see what's working and what's not and to sit down and talk – I was with young girls in south Africa last month – understanding why our tools for prevention aren't being adopted, and what way may need to invent to help protect them. And just seeing the challenges – you know I’ve gotten up to northern Nigeria quite a bit and we were –
Does that still move you when you're in a ward like that? Or you know, going through, seeing kids that just are so probably happy… they have no idea who are you are…
Gates: Oh of course.
But they just are happy to see you. Somebody.
Gates: Well talking to mothers, you know, always brings it home because they're so anxious to do everything they can for their kids and so tragic for them. You know, they think the same way that any of us would, and yet they have to deal with a far far more difficult situation.
----
It's interesting when I think of your life (at Microsoft), it was probably driven by competition and confrontation, and now you have to be a collaborator and you have to bring on governments and convince people. Was that a difficult shift for you or is there competition also involved in this?
Gates: It's interesting when I think of your life then, it was probably driven by competition and confrontation, and now you have to be a collaborator and you have to bring on governments and convince people. Was that a difficult shift for you or is there competition also involved in this?
But you must – when you're driving around, over the red clay of some of these African villages that have never see asphalt, you think, Oh man I could fix this. There's got to be some innovative idea to fix this. Does it get frustrating? The slow pace of change?
Gates: Yeah, you wish that you could move more rapidly and you have setbacks. You know, the AIDS epidemic was a huge setback for Africa, and it's only through generosity that we've avoided that just completely crippling an entire generation there. And so you have to be willing to see that sometimes the governments of these poor countries don't come through. You have to think about that as a constraint. How do you help them be better? How do you come up with things that actually work, even in those tough situations.
You've been selling your ideas, your innovations since you were fifteen. What's tougher, selling someone on the idea of a piece of software, or selling someone on using their money to help the world?
Gates: Well software was changing so fast, so unbelievable, that that got very quick adoption. I think philanthropy is also growing and catching on. Figuring out how the philanthropy sector, which is quite small compared to the private sector, which is the biggest by far, and then the governments, you know, even in these poor countries over time has to take on these key responsibilities. How does philanthropy accelerate that? Drive the kind of innovations, make sure they get used well. So it plays this kind of special role. We are seeing smarter philanthropy, more philanthropy, and that's true world wide. So it's kind of a movement that has a lot of accomplishments, even though as a percentage of the economy, it's still only a few per cent.
----
Basically you have called out billionaires and called on them to give their money over for good causes.
Gates: Well certainly, I believe in generous aid policies. The U.S. and Canada are two generous governments and we reach out and partner with anyone who believes in foreign aid. I have not met Trump and discussed any issues with him. There have been Republican administrations like the Bush administration who initiated this AIDS generosity. So it's not purely a right-left thing. President Bush made the U.S. absolutely the leader, between its own PEPFAR, and it's been by far the biggest Global Fund donor. That's a legacy. We work with whoever is elected. Some will bring a more generous, open view of the world than others.
Are you concerned at all with the tenor of this campaign as far as the things that you value with the anti-immigration policies and these sorts of things seem to work against the core values of America that have made funds like this so successful?
Gates: Well, the idea of explaining why free trade is good, why immigration is good, why the world is so connected, that we need to think in terms of humanity and being generous to each other, you know, that's proving to be a challenge. And so you know it reminds us that we're not doing as good a job on this as we should. If we think long term, the younger generation here is better about embracing the world. Not seeing countries boundaries kind of an “us versus them” thing. But I hope we can do better. I am surprised that in various countries, whether it's the U.K. or the U.S., you see isolationist tendencies that would tend to work against the co-operation, whether it's climate change, immigration, innovation, helping the very poorest. You know, those are things where you want to think across country boundaries and see a win-win-type solution.
----
It appears that your relationship with your wife is just such a perfect partnership and a shared passion. Was there ever a concern – it's been 10 years now I guess that you've focused solely on this – that you’d drive each other crazy working together?
Gates: No, I think we knew that this would be just like raising the kids together, this would be a fun thing to do in partnership. And you know, we're so lucky because we get to hire in very smart people. We get to partner with governments like the Canadian Development Organization – CIDA, USAID – tonnes of scientists doing this work. This is fascinating. I mean, it is a high bar to say that it's more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people. But this work is even more fascinating. It requires us to think harder about how we build partnerships, who we get behind. And yet we get to see progress that in some ways is even more profound than the great advances that digital technology has provided.
What for you stands out as the pinnacle of the things this has done to change the face of the world?
Gates: Well for all these infectious diseases, the goal is to eventually get rid of them. And to do that we need to invent new tools, but nobody was doing that because there was no money to buy on behalf of the poorest, even the existing tools. So, scientists and companies weren't creating things like new vaccines. Now that we have this fund that's there to buy at the lowest price, but buy for those people these medicines, we see scientists everywhere coming up with those new tools. And so not only are we saving lives now, we're creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down. You know, I’ll get to see many disease eradications. and we're seeing a lot of progress. I mean, whenever you have a few setbacks, the idea that half as many children are dying now as back in 1990 and so… it was over 12 million a year, now it's less than 6 million a year. We have a clear path to get that under 3 million a year and we know what to do. And this generation of young Africans is a very large group. It's the one continent where you still have a lot more young people than old people. So making sure they're healthy, good nutrition, good education. That'll be important for the world.
Thank you so much for speaking with us today. Lovely to meet you.
Gates: Thank you.
