Gates-food: When Bill Gates was a young man, he wanted to turn his taste for software into a successful business. The Microsoft founder got rich beyond any technologist’s dreams. But Gates has changed over the years. His latest idea isn’t quite to get poor through low technology, but he will be giving away money to help people engaged in the simplest of economic activities: subsistence agriculture.
The shift has been gradual, but at some point in the last few years Gates started to dedicate more of his time to charity than to profit-seeking activities. Of course, he’s still running a business – a foundation with a $30 billion endowment. But the culture of giving is quite different from the world of developing and selling commercial products.
When he embarked on his path away from Microsoft, Gates retained his conviction that advanced technology was the key to solving problems. Early dreams of software-based solutions to poverty were quickly abandoned. Gates learns fast – but the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has often been criticised for paying too much attention to researchers in laboratories and too little to work in the field.
The complaints may have been exaggerated, but it has been hard for Gates to shake off his techno-geek air. He is making progress. His speech at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, was largely about field work – about looking “through the eyes of small farmers” in Africa.
The perspective leads to some investment in high technology, especially in seed research. But in Africa, the greater challenge is to make use of what is already known. The foundation plans to focus on such distinctly low-tech concerns such as grain transport, farmer education and market support.
Gates hasn’t abandoned business thinking. He continues to insist that foundations should do good as efficiently as possible. And his entrepreneurial vision persists, transformed for the new domain. At Microsoft, Gates always looked for big, under-served markets. When it comes to charity, the self-sufficient farmers of Africa offer the same sort of opportunity.