A Mother Working for the World's Mothers
- Sep 13, 2015
- 3 min read
Born as Melinda Ann French on August 15, 1964, in Dallas, Texas, Melinda Gates has three siblings. Her father, Ray French, was an aerospace engineer while her mother, Elaine French, was stay-at-home mom.
Melinda developed an early interest in computers and went on to pursue this interest in college, earning a bachelor's degree in computer science from Duke University in 1986. The following year, she obtained a master's in business administration, with a focus in economics, from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.
Melinda took a job at Microsoft Corporation in 1987. She started out as product manager, and over the course of her nine years working for Microsoft, she worked her way up to the post of general manager.
In 1987 Melinda first met her new boss, Bill Gates, at a PC trade show in Manhattan. When he eventually asked her out with a couple of weeks' notice, she initially was put off by his over-planning but soon realized his busy schedule made spontaneity difficult. Accepting this, she agreed to a date.
The couple dated for six years before getting married in 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. The couple has three kids, and after the birth of their daughter, Melinda decided to leave her job at Microsoft so she could focus on child rearing and philanthropic efforts.
The story of the world’s largest private foundation begins with a couple reading a news article about suffering in the developing world. The husband clipped the article and sent it to his father, the philanthropist William H Gates, writing: “Dad, maybe we can do something about this.”
It was the first step towards the creation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Since beginning their great philanthropic mission in 1997, the husband and wife team have become a powerful catalyst for the improvement of lives in the world’s poorest countries. Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help lead healthy, productive lives. In the developing countries, it focuses on improving the citizen’s health, and lifting them out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the United States, the foundation ensures those with the least resources have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.
The foundation’s trust endowment of $43.5 billion makes grant payments in excess of $3 billion every year. Its focus has been on bridging the enormous health deficit between rich and poor. Among its goals are the eradication of malaria and polio, and controlling the spread of tuberculosis and HIV.
Investor Warren Buffet joined the foundation as a trustee in 2006 with a £30 billion pledge. In 2008, Bill Gates resigned as chief software architect at Microsoft, to focus solely on the work of the foundation.
In total, the fund has given $32.9 billion in grants to health programmes around the world. Its work focusses mainly on prevention, immunisation and vaccination.
Since the turn of the century, partly thanks to the work of the foundation, four countries have eradicated malaria. Mortality from the disease has dropped 42% in that time. Bill said in 2014 that malaria could be eliminated within a generation.
In 2014, after a massive coordinated effort between the Indian government, the Gates Foundation and Rotary International, India announced it was officially polio-free. The programme employed 2 million vaccinators who spread out across the country. Just five years before, India had more than half the world’s polio cases. It was “the greatest global health achievement I have ever witnessed”, said Bill. The foundation now aims to eradicate polio worldwide by 2018.
The foundation has also funded the Guardian’s award-winning Global Development website since 2010.
In 2011, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation officially restated its mission as: "improving equity in four areas: global health, education, access to digital information via public libraries, and support for at-risk families in Washington State and Oregon." In 2012 Melinda pledged $560 million toward improving access to contraception for women in third-world countries.
The foundation has offices worldwide. Besides their Seattle headquarters, they have offices in Washington, D.C, London, New Delhi, Beijing, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg and Abuja.
Adapted from Bio. and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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