In
the 12 years since Melinda Gates and her husband, Bill, created the
Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, she
has done a lot of traveling. A reserved woman who has long been wary of
the public glare attached to the Gates name, she comes alive, her
associates say, when she’s visiting the foundation’s projects in remote
corners of the world. “You get her out in the field with a group of
women, sitting on a mat or under a tree or in a hut, she is totally in
her element, totally comfortable,” says Gary Darmstadt, director of
family health at the foundation’s global health program.
Visiting
vaccine programs in sub-Saharan Africa, Gates would often ask women at
remote clinics what else they needed. Very often, she says, they would
speak urgently about birth control. “Women sitting on a bench, 20 of
them, immediately they’ll start speaking out and saying, ‘I wish I had
that injection I used to get,’” says Gates. “‘I came to this clinic
three months ago, and I got my injection. I came last week, and I
couldn’t get it, and I’m here again.’”
They
were talking about Depo-Provera, which is popular in many poor
countries because women need to take it only four times a year, and
because they can hide it, if necessary, from unsupportive husbands. As
Gates discovered, injectable contraceptives, like many other forms of
birth control, are frequently out of stock in clinics in the developing
world, a result of both funding shortages and supply-chain problems.
Women
would tell her that they’d left their farms and walked for hours,
sometimes with children in tow, often without the knowledge of their
husbands, in their fruitless search for the shot. “I was just stunned by
how vociferous women were about what they wanted,” she says.
Because
of those women, Gates made a decision that’s likely to change lives all
over the world. As she revealed in an exclusive interview with Newsweek,
she has decided to make family planning her signature issue and primary
public health a priority. “My goal is to get this back on the global
agenda,” she says. She is sitting in an office in the Gates Foundation’s
900,000-square-foot headquarters in downtown Seattle, a pair of airy
boomerang-shaped buildings flooded with natural light. It was here at
headquarters late last year that she announced her new emphasis on
contraception at an all-staff meeting, to thrilled applause.
Now
the foundation, which is worth almost $34 billion, is putting her
agenda into practice. In July it’s teaming up with the British
government to cosponsor a summit of world leaders in London, to start
raising the $4 billion the foundation says it will cost to get 120
million more women access to contraceptives by 2020. And in a move that
could be hugely significant for American women, it is pouring money into
the long-neglected field of contraceptive research, seeking entirely
new methods of birth control. Ultimately Gates hopes to galvanize a
global movement. “When I started to realize that that needed to get done
in family planning, I finally said, OK, I’m the person that’s going to
do that,” she says.
Despite
Gates’s passion, stepping forward wasn’t an easy decision. For one
thing, the former Microsoft manager has always shunned the spotlight.
The first time she agreed to a magazine profile was in 2008, 14 years
after her marriage, when she spoke to Fortune about the
foundation’s work. “I was reluctant to speak out on behalf of any
foundation issues early on, because I had little kids, and I wanted some
privacy in my family life,” she says.
Perhaps
more importantly, there’s her Catholic faith, which has always informed
her work. “From the very beginning, we said that as a foundation we
will not support abortion, because we don’t believe in funding it,” she
says. She’s long disagreed with the church’s position on contraception,
and the Gates Foundation did some family-planning funding early in its
history. Still, she went through a lot of soul-searching before she was
ready to champion the issue publicly. “I had to wrestle with which
pieces of religion do I use and believe in my life, what would I counsel
my daughters to do,” she says. Defying church teachings was difficult,
she adds, but also came to seem morally necessary. Otherwise, she says,
“we’re not serving the other piece of the Catholic mission, which is
social justice.”
Gates
believes that by focusing on the lives of women and children, and by
making it clear that the agenda is neither coercive population control
nor abortion, the controversy over international family-planning
programs can be defused. Right now, she points out, 100,000 women
annually die in childbirth after unintended pregnancies. Six hundred
thousand babies born to women who didn’t want to be pregnant die in the
first month of life. “She is somebody who really sees this as a
public-health necessity,” says Melanne Verveer, the United States
ambassador at large for global women’s issues. “I think she believes,
and I hope she is right, that people of different political persuasions
can come together on this issue.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/melinda-gates-new-crusade-investing-billions-in-women-s-health.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/06/melinda-gates-new-crusade-investing-billions-in-women-s-health.html
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