Gates Notes 2020...
Each year Bill & Melinda Gates publish an annual letter reflecting on their progress at the Gates Foundation. This year’s is found here: https://www.gatesnotes.com/2020-Annual-Letter. This year marks 20 years for the foundation, so the letter is particularly compelling. They write about a few of their biggest lessons over the last two decades in the field of health and education:
Investing in global vaccinations and medicines: The Gates Foundation was an early investor in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. As of last year, Gavi had helped bring vaccinations to 760 million children and reduce the cost of a number of vaccines themselves. They also supported the creation of the Global Fund, to help combat HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and bring the medicines that were saving lives in rich countries to developing ones. Over the next years of their work, they want to continue to reach the last 14% of children who have not had their basic immunizations, and ensure that treatment for HIV/AIDS becomes easier and more accessible.
Focus on K-12 and Post-Secondary education: One of the most poignant pieces of the notes to me was the following comment:
“If you’d asked us 20 years ago, we would have guessed that global health would be our foundation’s riskiest work, and our U.S. education work would be our surest bet. In fact, it has turned out just the opposite… But one thing that makes improving education tricky is that even among people who work on the issue, there isn’t much agreement on what works and what doesn’t.
…In global health, we know that if children receive the measles vaccine, they will be protected against the disease, which means they’re more likely to survive. But there’s no consensus on cause and effect in education. Are charter schools good or bad? Should the school day be shorter or longer? Is this lesson plan for fractions better than that one? Educators haven’t been able to answer those questions with enough certainty to establish clear best practices.”
I found this to be so incredibly true – in the field of health, if a vaccine works, it generally becomes a story and challenge about how to get that vaccine to every single child who needs it. But in education, the challenges feel so basic. We do not always know – in fact, we rarely know – what can work on a broad scale. What can have a big impact with large populations of students, and be cost-effective in each setting? The challenge is not getting every student a good education; the challenge is agreeing on what that means in the first place.
Climate Change: 860 million people still do not have access to electricity. But to make a change here, we also need to find a way to deliver power without contributing to climate change. In particular, the developing nations will be hit the hardest by climate change, despite contributing the least to it. Agriculture in particular, will need to change, as farmers will face droughts, floods, and insect invasions (like the locusts in Kenya). Over the next years, the Gates Foundation will be playing a larger role in this fight.
Gender: As Melinda Gates says ““The data is unequivocal: No matter where in the world you are born, your life will be harder if you are born a girl.” As the world approaches the 25th anniversary of the Beijing World Conference on Women, this year will have a lot of energy around gender equality. But where we have failed over the last quarter of a century, we need to succeed in the next quarter.
Each year, I tend to reflect on our own year at Impact Network as we read this letter. And it’s interesting to note that the focus this year highlights a lot of the areas in which we are hoping to make a difference in the lives of our 6,000 students in 2020. It also tracks similarly with our challenges – that even as we have great evidence about the effectiveness of our programs (https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/downloads/report/Midline-Report-Mixed-Methods-Cluster-RCT-of-eSchool-360-Model-in-Rural-Zambia-February-2020.pdf), the education sector is and always has been a bit more messy than health.