Do you think the goals outlined by Bill and Melinda Gates over the next 15 years are achievable? Share your thoughts 
 
 Bill and Melinda Gates have outlined their vision for the world over the next 15 years, predicting that the lives of the people in the poorest countries will improve faster than at any other time in history. 
 
 The Gates foundation’s seventh annual letter includes several “big bets” from the philanthropists on what they predict will be the big breakthroughs in global health, education and agriculture. 
 
 The letter states this year’s bets were inspired by the prediction Bill Gates and his Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, made 40 years ago, that personal computers and software would transform people’s lives. 
 
 “Some people thought they were nuts. But the bet turned out well,” said the letter. “Fifteen years ago, the two of us made a similar bet. We started our foundation in 2000 with the idea that by backing innovative work in health and education, we could help dramatically reduce inequity. The progress we’ve seen so far is very exciting – so exciting that we are doubling down on the bet we made 15 years ago and picking ambitious goals for what’s possible 15 years from now.” 
 
 
 
 The Gates Foundation predicts the following breakthroughs in the next 15 years: 
 
 Child deaths will reduce by half, and more diseases will be eradicated than ever before. 
 
 Diseases such as polio, guinea worm, elephantiasis and blinding trachoma will be eradicated. 
 
 
 
 The world will have a vaccine to prevent people with malaria from spreading it to the mosquitoes that bite them, a single-dose cure that clears the parasite completely out of a person’s body, and a diagnostic test to show whether a person is infected with malaria. 
 
 Agricultural productivity will increase by 50% across Africa, allowing farmers to grow a greater variety of nutritious food. 
 
 Digital banking will grow. By 2030, 2 billion people who don’t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payments with their phones. 
 
 Online education will flourish as high-speed networks grow and smartphones become more affordable. 
 
 
 
 What do you think? We want to know your thoughts. Do you think these goals are achievable, or overly optimistic? What would your prediction be for development progress over the next 15 years? Share your thoughts in the comment thread below or tweet us at @GdnDevelopment. ||||| CLOSE Skip in Skip x Embed x Share Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says the lives of poor people around the world will improve more over the next 15 years "than at any time in history." (Jan. 22) AP 
 
 July 9, 2012. Melinda Gates, co-chair and trustee, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, visits a baby in the Marie Stopes International outreach program at Wakhinane health post, Dakar, Senegal. (Photo: Frederic Courbet, Gates Foundation) 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO — Despite the sober tone of the times — tensions with Russia, the growing threat of terrorism — one altruistic husband and wife duo spies a gradual improvement in the state of the world. 
 
 "We see heartbreaking things, but we also hear from people who tell us roads are improving and they can get their goods to market," says Melinda Gates, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual letter Wednesday. 
 
 "The world is changing for the better for many of the poor, and that's what fuels us," she said in a phone interview with USA TODAY. 
 
 Such optimism stands in contrast to the heavy issues under discussion this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where global leaders are meeting under an economic backdrop that shows 1% of the world's population will control half its assets by 2016, according to a new Oxfam study. 
 
 “'We know that when women can participate equally in a country's economy, the GDP goes up 12%.'” Melinda Gates 
 
 The letter, which marks the 15th anniversary of the $42 billion Seattle-based foundation, outlines how the organization wants to see further improvements by 2030 in the areas of: 
 
 Health. The foundation's goal is to help cut the number of children dying before age 5 to one in 40, from one in 20 today; reduce the number of women dying in childbirth; and ratchet up efforts to eradicate polio, malaria and HIV. "Health is why Bill and I started the foundation," says Gates. "If you are dealing with malaria, your main battle is just to stay alive." 
 
 Farming. When you have "7 in 10 African adults who are farmers, it's critical we not only push harder to improve their crop yields through science and technology but also make sure infrastructure is there, from roads to banking, that help people turn their crops into income," says Gates, noting that time is of the essence as Africa will be feeding 200 million more people by 2030. 
 
 Gender inequality. "We know that when women can participate equally in a country's economy, the GDP goes up 12%," says Gates. She adds that the empowerment of Third World women is linked to education, "which has a trickle-down effect in that they then marry later and have healthier children later." 
 
 (Photo: Prashant Panjiar for Gates Foundation) 
 
 While the Gates Foundation's biggest achievement to date "is getting the cost of vaccines down 37% and developing a market for such companies, which have grown from five to 12," Gates says progress on a large scale is only capable through strategic and significant First World government funding. 
 
 "Philanthropy can take risks where governments can't, but ultimately large governments need to contribute," says Gates. "We as citizens need to keep pressure on so that happens." 
 
 Timed with the letter's release is a new initiative from the foundation called Global Citizen. "People who want to help and connect with other individuals and groups who care" will be networked through the organization, which can be accessed through gatesletter.com, she says. 
 
 "When I visit places like Tanzania, the change on the ground is palpable," says Gates. "It's up to all of us to continue this fight." 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1JiV8Kj ||||| The Interview Issue 
 
 Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for Bloomberg BusinessweekGates outside his office at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 
 
 You recently tweeted that very rare clip of FDR being pushed in his wheelchair in 1944. Why did you find that to be a powerful image? 
 
 Polio eradication is this amazing effort. We’re raising the money to get it done by 2018. When these problems leave the rich world, they’re out of sight, out of mind. And reminding people of what a big problem it was and how amazingly others responded—which is why we have these tools at all—helps people, saying this can be the second disease to be eradicated. 
 
 What are the prospects for the eradication of polio and malaria? 
 
 Polio is where we have a very concrete plan. It’s raising $5.5 billion—of which the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation is going to give $1.8 billion. If we get credibility from the polio success, we can be more articulate about a malaria or measles elimination plan. The big one would be malaria, but that’s a long-term, in-my-lifetime-type thing, not imminent. 
 
 Can you share experiences in your travels that persuaded you to spend your time and money trying to improve global health? 
 
 In the rich world, the death of a child is very rare. This idea that there are places in the world where a quarter of the kids die before the age of 5, that’s very foreign, and it’s very graphic when you go and see all these kids with malaria. You go out in the field, which I get to do two or three times a year, and talk to mothers who’ve had their children die. You’re always reminded that the world you live in is not the average place. 
 
 How do you stay an optimist? 
 
 The percentage of kids who die, even during the time the foundation’s been involved in this, has gone from about 9 percent—this is the global average—to below 6 percent. So, by getting new vaccines out, we’ve had more progress in the last decade than ever before. The thing that’s so amazing is that in the 1960s, a third of the world was rich and two-thirds was very poor. Now the biggest block of the world’s population is middle-income: Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, China. The size of the very poor world is much smaller. 
 
 Are you seeing a direct connection between public health and political stability and economic growth? 
 
 In every country that’s moved to middle-income status, they improved health dramatically, which both cut the death rate but also improved the human talent pool. The health and agriculture interventions were somewhere in the 10 to 20 years before they got out of the poverty trap. 
 
 One of Google’s (GOOG) convictions is that bringing Internet connectivity to less-developed countries can lead to all sorts of secondary benefits. It has a project to float broadband transmitters on balloons. Can bringing Internet access to parts of the world that don’t have it help solve problems? 
 
 When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria. 
 
 Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they’re just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor. 
 
 The Gates Foundation has been criticized for being so big that it’s somehow distorting the agenda, particularly in higher education. What do you think of the argument that you and your allies aren’t being challenged because everyone is angling for your largesse? 
 
 When we get into a field, we do take a point of view, and raising controversy is a symptom. Fortunately, there is what’s called the charter school format that lets you try new things. The system is good at shutting down the ones that don’t work and replicating the ones that do. The big actor is government. If somebody says somebody is too big, it would be strange to point to us. 
 
 What have you learned so far about MOOCs, or massive open online courses? Are they a superior alternative to traditional classrooms, or is this the best available solution for students who can’t attend a traditional university? 
 
 If you look at who’s used MOOCs so far, it’s an elite phenomenon. The completion rates are very low, and the effect on employability is very low. Yes, it’s promising and exciting. But this notion that “just don’t go to school, just connect to a MOOC,” that’s like telling somebody to read the textbook. You’d have to couple that with student support, study groups, lab activity, and the credential. And until you complete that equation, MOOCs have not changed higher ed. 
 
 Are you optimistic that we can slow down climate change? 
 
 Anybody who says we’re close to the solution isn’t looking at the whole systems requirement. There’s 20 companies that I have investments in—some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure. 
 
 And yet the prevailing sentiment in Silicon Valley seems to be negative because the first batch of companies failed. 
 
 Some of those didn’t have contributions that would have made that much difference. We can’t depend on being faddish in Silicon Valley. The ease with which you get product adoption in the IT sector does make you naive when you move into non-IT sectors, including energy, about the life cycles, reliability, regulatory framework. 
 
 What does winning look like for the Gates Foundation? 
 
 If the death rates of poor children come down to the amazingly low rate of rich children, that would be a signature accomplishment. In the U.S., if we have an education system where the inner-city kid and the suburban kid have equal opportunity, that would be a huge contribution. 
 
 How do you compare the challenges of the first part of your career—changing the way we work and live, putting a PC on every desk—with the challenges of the second part? 
 
 I was very fulfilled in my 20s and 30s being a fanatic about the magic of software. What I’m doing now is more similar to that than you might think in terms of picking people to pursue a malaria vaccine or figure out how to get stuff delivered in the field. I don’t work day and night like I did in the early part of Microsoft (MSFT), because I’ve got a family. It’s a little less fanatical. 
 
 Do you miss having an operational role now, especially because in some markets Microsoft is an underdog again? 
 
 No, the importance of software and digital approaches, the opportunities and the room for innovation is such that there’s a lot of people doing good work, including Microsoft. And I’m engaged a bit there part-time. I’m on the board. It is a trade-off. I’ve chosen to focus more time on the foundation, so I don’t get to do quite as many magic whiteboard meetings. 
 
 There are other successful businessmen who are orienting their extracurricular interests around space exploration. Is that interesting to you? Is that worthwhile for humanity? 
 
 Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into. ||||| Bill Gates proves that one person can make a difference—if he happens to be the richest person in the world. Since forming the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and especially since leaving Microsoft in 2008 to dedicate himself full-time to the foundation’s work—Gates and his wife Melinda have emerged as two of history’s most powerful philanthropists, funding efforts from polio eradication to sewage-treatment plants, and setting the agenda for aid organizations around the world. They have convinced 127 fellow billionaires to sign their giving pledge, an oath to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic organizations. Today, the Gates Foundation has an endowment of $42 billion, almost four times the size of the Ford Foundation, and it distributes between $3 and $4 billion every year. As WIRED Science writer Maryn McKenna put it a few years ago, “Where Gates goes, governments and the media follow.” 
 
 So when Gates releases his annual letter each January, summarizing the foundation’s progress and laying out its priorities for the coming year, the world pays attention. Last year’s edition, a feisty debunking of “myths” about poverty, went viral. This year’s letter, co-written by both Bill and Melinda Gates and released today, is even more ambitious than usual. Titled “Our Big Bet for the Future,” it lays out a series of goals for the next decade and a half—cutting childhood deaths by half, eradicating polio and three other diseases, and making Africa capable of feeding itself, among others. Altogether, the letter predicts, “the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history.” 
 
 The letter is modeled on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a set of 15-year targets that expire this year and that Gates refers to as “one of the most important documents the UN ever did.” Representatives from every country in the world signed the goals in 2000, pledging among other things to reduce extreme poverty by 50 percent, slash child mortality by two thirds, and cut the maternal mortality rate by three quarters. Although not every target was reached—a full report card can be found here—the document is generally credited with focusing global aid efforts and providing a yardstick against which they can be measured. The UN is set to introduce a new set of development goals this September, and some observers worry that they will be a disappointment rather than an inspiration. Writing for the Guardian, Kevin Watkins frets that the discussions to date have been “hampered by a paralyzing lack of ambition, weak leadership, and the absence of a credible agenda to galvanise public engagement.” 
 
 That certainly does not describe this year’s Gates letter, the most rabble-rousing edition to date. Toward the end, the Gateses announce Global Citizens, a new program to educate and inspire action among the general public. “We want to give global citizens a way to lend their voice, urging governments, companies, and nonprofits to make these issues a priority,” the letter explains. In particular, the Foundation will ask its Global Citizens to push for a meaningful reboot of the UN’s Millennium Goals, and to hold their governments accountable for meeting those targets. It’s a surprisingly populist approach for the Foundation, which has tended to turn to billionaires for the bulk of its support. 
 
 In a wide-ranging phone conversation, WIRED spoke with Gates about this year’s letter, global inequality, and President Obama’s tax proposals. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 
 
 __The UN is working on its update to the Millennium Development Goals. How do you think it’s going? __ 
 
 We’re definitely on track. It will be a much longer document, and a broader set of goals than the MDGs were. 
 
 But the MDGs were so powerful because they were so succinct. Do you worry that if these goals become too broad, it will be harder to keep people focused? 
 
 That absolutely is a concern that I have. Then again, there are unfinished MDGs, and they will always have a very unique position. Key things like child health are so critical. If you have malnutrition you can’t do education very well. 
 
 I do think the new document will be so long that fewer people will read the whole thing. Then again, when we talk about books like the Koran or the Bible, not everybody reads every word of those things. I think of the MDGs like the Ten Commandments. 
 
 You operate from the belief that the world is radically improving in the fields of health, agriculture, and poverty. But there’s one area that you flick at in this letter where things seem to be getting worse, and that’s climate change. We’ve just learned that 2014 was the hottest year on record. Tech solutions are being developed, but they’re facing headwinds—be it political stagnation or extremely cheap gas prices. Do you have the same sense of optimism when you look at energy? 
 
 I have billions invested in various energy-related things—like battery companies, or cheaper ways of making electricity. I have a company that’s working on something called fourth-gen nuclear, this new super-safe nuclear design. So I think it is feasible to have energy sources that are even cheaper—although, as you say, that benchmark gets tougher as the price of natural gas and oil are so low. 
 
 There’s no doubt that we’re going to have some warming even as we start to deploy these solutions, because of the lags in the system. Nathan Myhrvold has written a few articles on this, about how even if you do the right things you still have some locked-in change. 
 
 I’ve been a big proponent that rich world governments should raise their energy R&D budgets. It is possible—based on the basic science of big energy, nuclear fuels, the photons that hit the earth from the sun—to have cheap energy. In the meantime we have to do some adaptation, which is mostly investing in agricultural systems so that farmers in the areas that will be most affected can have enough productivity and enough storage so that if they have lean years, their kids are not significantly malnourished. 
 
 __You’ve dedicated a ton of resources to delivering vaccines to remote areas of the world. It must drive you nuts when people in the rich world choose not to vaccinate their kids. __ 
 
 I just read this book called On Immunity: An Inoculation—which is so well written, it’s unbelievable—that talks about this. It’s a little bit unsurprising considering you’re saying to parents, “Hey, take this needle and inject it into your kid! Honestly, we’re sure that it does no harm!” It really takes explaining to people why this is not only beneficial to their child but to society as a whole. 
 
 The anti-vaccination crowd, it’s very unfortunate. They create risk and in some cases there have been pertussis-based deaths and measles deaths. Those are the two that show up pretty quickly when you get any group of kids that haven’t been vaccinated. People thought, “OK, we have the Internet, information will get out there.” But misinformation got out there as well. 
 
 I do think we’ll keep vaccination rates high in the US. Rationality will succeed. But it will take cases like this Disneyland thing to remind people how irresponsible it is. The science about the safety is very, very strong. 
 
 Another source of discouraging data: income inequality. You’ve read Thomas Piketty’s Capital, and had nice things to say about it. But you also said that some inequality is built into the capitalist system, and the question is when it begins to do more harm than good. Has inequality become a hinderance? 
 
 I don’t think in some huge way. Of course, at a global level, income inequality is going down, because countries like China and India are getting richer much, much faster than the rich world is getting richer. So the overall picture on income inequality is very, very positive. And yet, each country has to look at the fact that, because of the nature of capitalism, there’s a tendency at the country level to have greater inequality unless you have tax policies to moderate it. So it’s a great democratic debate: What should those tax policies be? For the one country whose tax policies I know, the US, I’ve been in favor of more progressive tax approaches. 
 
 I also think philanthropy, although not a total solution to it, does moderate the problem. Especially if those who have been lucky give of their time and money to causes—like improving education or health—that speak to the most basic inequities. 
 
 So it’s a great topic for debate. A democracy is a self-correcting system, and over time I’d expect them to get it right. The founders were a little worried that the masses would get rid of capitalist incentives by going too far, but at least in the US that certainly hasn’t been a problem. The system has worked well for hundreds of years. 
 
 We’re speaking the day of the State of the Union. What do you think of the President’s tax proposals? 
 
 I don’t know the specifics very well so I really can’t comment. Just being pragmatic, the likelihood of a change in the tax system is fairly low. But I’ll be very interested. He no doubt will be promoting things that are progressive in nature so it’ll be interesting to see what he picks. 
 
 Let’s talk about your Global Citizen Initiative. This seems like a departure for you. How did it come about? 
 
 Some 6.5 million children die every year. There’s a subset of that where there’s an earthquake or flood, and people are so anxious to give and help. It reminds you that when people can connect and have an image of what’s going on, in those acute situations, they care and are willing to get involved. But 98 percent of childhood death comes from chronic, ongoing things, not those headline, one-time events. It’s malaria every day, diarrhea every day, pneumonia every day. The idea is that, if you sign up, on an ongoing basis, a few times a month we’ll give you an update on how things are going. It won’t just be a headline about an earthquake. 
 
 The idea is getting people to use their voice to say their governments should continue to be generous on aid. We're dealing with tight budgets. Even countries that have been generous, like the Netherlands or Australia, have made cuts to their aid budgets. And within the universe of NGOs, some are agricultural, some are environmental, some are health, you can pick one of those that you want to dive down into and get involved with. 
 
 That is a new thing. We’re not sure how well that will resonate. But we do think people’s basic morality, the desire to care about humanity broadly, that it’s fairly timely. There’s a bit of a vacuum there. There’s not an alternate way for people to grab on and see how they might contribute more. 
 
 At the same time, critics have grown dismissive of “clicktivism,” little bursts of online activity that don’t result in any sustained commitment or change. How do you keep this from being a mile wide and an inch deep? 
 
 The starting point is very shallow. But the beauty is you can use that to get in more deeply. If you sign up to be a global citizen, we won’t send you too much email but we’ll say, “Hey, if you’re interested in going to Africa, not only can you do some interesting fun things, but you’d have a chance to get exposed to these issues, see this stuff on the ground.” Once you do that, people tend to get hooked. They’ll see something and latch onto it—a particular village or disease. 
 
 But you’re right. Just because we have 10 million global citizens who give us their email address, that’s not our final metric. That’s a starting metric. The metric I care about is people who get involved in real activism, really take trips, really start donating and volunteering. This is just a gateway toward deeper involvement, if we do our job right.
– A bold prediction, courtesy of the Gates Foundation: The lives of people in poor countries "will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any time in history." That statement comes via the foundation's annual letter, published today, which makes some other "big bets." Among them: Polio will be eradicated by 2020, Africa's agricultural productivity will increase by 50% by 2030, and deaths of children under 5 will be cut in half by 2030, the Guardian and the AP report. Why are Bill and Melinda Gates so confident? Their foundation is celebrating its 15th anniversary, and the progress against inequity that they've seen in those 15 years is "very exciting—so exciting that we are doubling down on the bet we made 15 years ago, and picking ambitious goals for what's possible 15 years from now." In addition to polio, the foundation says guinea worm, elephantiasis, and blinding trachoma will be eliminated by 2030. There will also be a single-dose cure for malaria, a vaccine to prevent it spreading to mosquitoes that bite those with the disease, and a diagnostic test to reveal the infected, the Gateses predict. The foundation also foresees a rise in digital banking and online education and will push for gender equality. "We know that when women can participate equally in a country's economy, the GDP goes up 12%," Melinda Gates tells USA Today. (Help for the poor and inequality appear to be a hot topic, with Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush each taking on the issue, the New York Times reports.)