How can you let these children die?

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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Sanctity of life.

This was what brought my attention to this article. People debate over abortion, campaign against smoking and protest against drug abuse. Yet, whilst we have all been so concerned with how people have chosen to destroy their lives, we neglect the fate of innocent children with absolutely no control over theirs.

The writer expresses his shock at how we have been oblivious to their plight. I fully agree with the author on this point. I am too appalled that till this day, people are dying from diseases which cures and vaccines have been developed for decades or even centuries ago.

However, I do not believe in his proposed method in going about saving these lives.

He claims people are not lending their helping hands because “the market did not reward saving the lives of these children”. Thus, the solution lies in “approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians”.

Is this what the human race has evolved into? With the rise of technology, have we all transformed into our very own creations? Are we all emotionless beings of work, profit and efficiency? Since when did we need a reason to help people? Hell, we save people because we want to, because they are human beings just like us!

Furthermore, the writer feels the way to inspire people to join the cause is to “convey the human impact of the work, so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected”. This humanitarian point of view simply contradicts all he has commented on earlier.

I understand where the writer is coming from. In a bid to persuade his readers, he has gone about telling them what they have to gain from offering their help. Yet, in doing so, the whole ideal of altruism has mutated into one giant transaction in a bid to further stimulate the world economy, so the poor may become stepping stones for those in power. This is unacceptable. When we wish to “press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people”, do we really mean for the governments to find ways to squeeze yet more cold hard cash out of the poor souls to satisfy their insatiable appetite, when all they wish for is a percentile of our living conditions? Are we inculcating values to achieve unparalleled material success with the unfortunate as sacrifice? I certainly hope not.

The world is spiraling off in an abysmal direction. A mere 14 year old opens his heart out to the poor. Will those blinded by power do the same too?

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