The 2009 recession was a “huge setback” for the world’s poorest people, Microsoft cofounder and Chairman Bill Gates wrote in his 2010 annual letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Although the acute financial crisis is over, the economy is still weak and the world will spend a lot of years undoing the damage, which includes lingering unemployment and huge government deficits and debts at record levels,” Gates wrote.
But Gates wrote that he is “still very optimistic about the progress we can make in the years ahead.” The key to that optimism is scientific and technological innovation.
It’s innovation that will make the difference between a bleak future in which donor funds deliver little measurable benefit to the developing world and a bright one, in which governments, nonprofits and private companies can “do a lot more for the same cost,” Gates wrote.
Innovation Is the Future
Without innovation, Gates wrote, “the picture is quite bleak. Health costs for the rich will escalate, forcing tough trade-offs and keeping the poor stuck in the bad situation they are in today.” The poor will be hurt both by rising energy costs and the impact of climate change, and the poor will suffer food shortages, he wrote.
“However, I am optimistic that innovations will allow us to avoid these bleak outcomes,” Gates wrote. “In the United States, advances in online learning and new ways to help teachers improve will make a great education more accessible than ever. With vaccines, drugs and other improvements, health in poor countries will continue to get better, and people will choose to have smaller families.”
“With better seeds, training and access to markets, farmers in poor countries will be able to grow more food,” he wrote. “The world will find clean ways to produce electricity at a lower cost, and more people will…
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