Giving Compass' Take:

• Martin Morse Wooster discusses his belief that donor resources and access to data can address poverty and global health issues. 

• What are the ways that you use data to inform your philanthropy? What are the barriers for donors in understanding/addressing global health problems?

• Read more on the efforts happening to solve extreme poverty. 

Bill Gates has been a philanthropist for over a quarter of a century, but there’s still a substantial question about him: what are his political views? I’ve watched and read about Gates’s philanthropy ever since he became a major giver, and five years ago once spent a lunch with him (and 300 other people) at the American Enterprise Institute. But although I can say with confidence, “the Gates Foundation is a liberal foundation,” I can’t tell you whether Bill Gates is a liberal. I’ve never heard him express a political opinion.

But I can speak with confidence about the way that Bill Gates views the world. He likes numbers and statistics. He was a great admirer of Dr. Hans Rosling, the Swedish epidemiologist whose writings and TED talks conveyed a good deal of valuable, clear-headed information about poverty.

He begins his lecture with three key statements:

“Global health has seen dramatic improvements in recent decades.” Between 1990 and 2017, the number of children under age 5 dying each year has fallen in half, from around 12 million deaths annually to under 6 million. There are also far more people living in their seventies and eighties in 2017 than there were in 1990.

“Improvements are made possible by innovation.” The oral polio vaccine was invented in 1961, but not until 1988, when the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched, did the vaccine become available worldwide. In the past three decades, polio deaths have fallen by 99.9 percent, thanks to a “massive volunteer effort” from Rotary International.

“Innovation is a long game.” Gates believes that many of the innovations he sees happening in public health in the next 20 years are taking place now. What he foresees is that preventable deaths in lower-income countries will decline. Malnutrition will fall because people in the Third World will be able to get better food—including better probiotics.

Read the full article about using statistics for poverty by Martin Morse Wooster at Philanthropy Daily.