The world’s richest charity confronts the health of the world’s poorest people
“THREE-QUARTERS of a billion dollars is a lot of almost anybody’s money. Almost anybody, that is, except Bill Gates. Even for him, though, it is more than small change. And that is the size of the donation announced on January 24th by the foundation that bears his name and that of Melinda, his wife. The money is going to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI).
The Gates foundation is the richest charity in the world. Its endowment is worth $28 billion. Its annual income is that of a small country. And its founders are on a mission. The more modest parts of that mission are to improve America’s schools and libraries and to benefit Mr Gates’s native region of the Pacific Northwest (charity, after all, begins at home). The most ambitious part, though, is to free the world—and, in particular, those regions of it that are poor—of ill health.”
Truly a noble undertaking. I was surprised to read this in an article after the tragic Asian Tsunami. An estimated 150,000 children in Africa die each month from malaria, he said.”We have the world’s eyes focused on the tsunami of the Indian Ocean, but the world continues to overlook the silent tsunamis of deaths from malaria which take every month the number of people that died in the… (Daily Herald)