Fast Co: Bill Gates Says The World Is Getting Vastly Better
Bill and Melinda Gates continue to inspire us! What extraordinary leadership and vision!
In the Gates Foundation’s annual letter, Bill and Melinda show what their money (and foreign aid in general) has done for the developing world.
For the past five years, Bill and Melinda Gates have released a letter in January outlining the work the foundation has done in the last year. This year, the duo took a bit of a different approach. Concerned, apparently, by virulent myths that programs funded by the Gates Foundation are useless, are not effective, or are potentially dangerous, the couple’s letter focuses on dispelling what they call the three main myths of foreign aid.
Their main desire is to debunk everyone’s idea that the world is not getting better. There are lots of problems remaining, say the Gateses, but life for most people in the world is getting markedly better every year: “Melinda and I are disgusted by the fact that more than 6 million children died last year. But we are motivated by the fact that this number is the lowest ever recorded. We want to make sure it keeps going down.”
The myths, they write “reflect a dim view of the future, one that says the world isn’t improving but staying poor and sick, and getting overcrowded. We’re going to make the opposite case, that the world is getting better, and that in two decades it will be better still.”
MYTH 1: POOR COUNTRIES WILL ALWAYS BE POOR
The first myth is that foreign aid simply doesn’t work, that “poor countries are doomed to stay poor.” Bill writes that this simply isn’t true, that in his lifetime, poor countries have made enormous progress:
Chez Froggie 