As co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda French Gates has shown a passionate commitment to the fight against global poverty. In honor of her dedication and compassion in the field of global health and development, CARE presented her with the International Humanitarian Award for Global Change at a gala in New York on May 10, 2007. The remarks below are excepts from Melinda's acceptance speech at the event.
| Melinda French Gates received CARE's International Humanitarian Award at a gala on May 10, 2007. (©2007 Patrick McMullan Studios) |
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The world does not need us to think small and accomplish easy goals. It needs us to think big and to strive for constant progress. That's the same posture I see in CARE's work. This is not an organization that is content to focus on nutrition or sanitation or education alone. CARE's mission is to end poverty.
This evening I want to talk about fighting inequity. Because for Bill and me, realizing the scope of inequity in our world is what really lit a fire under our philanthropic efforts.
I remember several years ago sitting with Bill and reading an article we'd been given. It was about the millions of children dying in poor countries every year from diseases we don't think about much in this country. The article that we were reading at the time was focused on a disease called rotavirus, which kills about 600,000 children a year.
Bill and I read this article and we were just getting started with the Foundation and we just said this can't be! 600,000 children, one disease. How come we never hear about it? We take our children to be vaccinated. We think. We read. We don't hear about it. And we thought if a single disease were killing that many children, certainly we'd be running races in the United States. It would be front page news.
But it wasn't. How could we reach any other conclusion but this: Some lives in this world are seen as worth saving and others are not. The realization that we had in reading that article drives all the Foundation work that we do today and will continue to do throughout our lifetime. Every human life has equal worth. That is the premise on which we founded our mission.
This premise has been affirmed to me over and over again in my travels. Whatever the conditions of peoples' lives, wherever they live, however they live, they share the same hopes, the same dreams as you and I in this room. When I travel, people talk about they want food, health, safety, shelter, all the things we care about. They care for their loved ones. They want to provide for their children.
They talk over and over again about the future of their children and educating their children. In so many places, those building blocks of dignity are unattainable. Those aspirations are unachievable. Our goal is really quite simple. It's to give every person a chance to live a healthy and a productive life.
Looking at a world where 11 million children die before their fifth birthday, 1 billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and one out of every eight people go hungry every single day, the toughest question for us was, "Where do you begin?"
We chose health as our point of entry because when health improves, life improves by every single measure, from higher literacy to better education, stronger economic growth and a more stable and prosperous society.There's some misunderstanding about the Foundation because people often say, "Well, you started in health, but didn't you know there were these other problems?"
Of course we saw the other problems. But we decided to focus on what we were good at and what was close to our hearts. For Bill and me that's technology. But when I say technology I mean bio-technology. We saw the gap between vaccines we were getting for our children in the United States and those delivered in the developing world.
And yet we've had these vaccines for 15, 20 years. How could that be? And we saw that because there was a market failure, there was no vaccine being worked on for malaria or tuberculosis. We don't have those diseases in the United States. And even though we've mapped the human genome, we were not really making progress on an HIV vaccine.
All you need to do is to visit the places where our grantees are working to see that the cycle of inequity, of ill health is both a cause and an effect. After all, immunizing children against a disease is really quite a hollow promise if they don't have enough to eat.
That's why for us health is neither a starting point nor an ending point, it's an intervention point. We were already looking at other points of intervention.
So we started a group inside the Foundation that is now called Global Development. In the cycle of inequity there are so many points of vulnerability: hunger, economic opportunity, poor governance, the list goes on and on. But following the lead of organizations like CARE, we're starting to look at these areas of vulnerability and say, "But they're amazing opportunities."
As we look at areas in global development, whether it's access to information, better sanitation and water, we're hopeful that new ideas, new technology and a new sense of a worldwide commitment can help us confront these old and lingering challenges. To us, global development isn't just about better seeds, better food, or better access to capital. It's about a better future.
I want to share one thought in closing:. We in this room tonight are all incredibly lucky. We have achieved the positions we have by virtue of our intelligence, our talents, our hard work. And I don't want to diminish any of our success by saying this. But none of those things would have mattered if we didn't live where we live.
Bill is the first one to acknowledge that he would not have been able to create Microsoft if it were not for what he's afforded in this country. Warren Buffet, one of the world's greatest investors, speaks both publicly and privately about the fact that if he'd been born in a different country or a different time and place, there would have been no market for his talents.
I met a woman in Nigeria last fall who really still sticks in my mind. She was a very sharp woman and I was asking her a little bit about her business.
She was buying coal in the city and then selling it out in the country because she could get a higher price in the country. And I was asking her, why did you move to this particular city? And she looked at me like I was completely dense, like I had two heads, and she said, "Well, of course I picked up and moved here because the price of coal is higher." And I thought, you know, if she was sitting in this room tonight, I think that she would be working at a hedge fund.
That's the entrepreneurial spark that you see over and over and over again when you're out in the developing world. And that's what we need to tap, just by letting the people have access to some of the basics that we have access to here today. For me it hits home perhaps even more closely because I'm a woman.
While the deck is stacked against everybody in the developing world, it's stacked even higher against women. Reporters like to ask me when I sometimes take them out with me to see what's going on in the world; they'll say to me, "You live so well, you know, here you are visiting the poorest of the poor. Isn't it jarring?" But I never, never look at it that way.
Whenever I go out to visit the developing world and I'm welcomed with open arms by these women who are so incredibly generous and I sit down in their home, I sit down on a mat on the floor, and I always think, you know, it could be me so easily sitting on the other side of that mat. And I think if I was in that situation what would I do? Where would I go?
What would I do for my children, for my family, for myself? And the answer is I would do everything humanly possible. I'd work to exhaustion if that was the only opportunity. I would borrow or beg, certainly, if necessary, everything humanly possible. And when I'd done all of that I think I'd pray. I'd pray for change, for hope, for someone to see my struggle and offer a little bit of help.
And that is why I'm here tonight. Because in the fight against inequity, in the struggle against poverty, that prayer finds an answer in an organization like CARE and the hope that you give it and so many others. Thank you.
