Is Bill Gates monopolizing development?

Posted By David Bosco Monday, November 1, 2010 - 3:11 PM Share

David Rieff is worried that the Gates Foundation is having an outsized influence on how governments, international organizations, and publics think about development challenges:

[A]mericans, like people everywhere in the rich world to a greater or lesser degree, are in love with quick fixes. As one relief officially put it to me recently, it is as if the rescue of the Chilean miners were a model for how we could ensure food security in sub-Saharan Africa or ensure livelihoods in Haiti. That is, the essence of what we have to do is simply find the right cutting-edge technologies and deploy sufficient money and bureaucratic energies to apply them; in short, that there is a technological fix on offer somewhere near, and that we are on the brink of uncovering it. It is this worldview that is at the heart of the approach both to global health and agricultural development that has been championed, and to an important degree underwritten, by the Gates Foundation, and which now informs the thinking of the major Western donor governments and of the United Nations system.

In Rieff's view, the Gates Foundation promotes a fundamentally ahistorical and apolitical view of development and, in so doing, raises expectations about what resources and technical fixes can achieve to unsustainable levels. I'm curious about his claim that the Gates view has managed to thoroughly infiltrate the U.N. system. In other contexts, Rieff has been a savage and eloquent critic of the U.N.'s institutional worldview, which begs the question of whether the Gates philosophy is displacing anything Rieff considers valuable.

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WAYNE C WHITE

12:36 PM ET

November 2, 2010

unsustainable compassionate development

Yes, Gates philanthropy has that effect. The magnifier is that other players were also going the route of bypassing difficult problems of needed transformational change by opting to bundle resources for conspicuous compassion. The Bush administration embraced PEPFAR (AIDS response, mostly in Africa) and the President's Malaria Initiative, and this administration continued the momentum, hiring a medical doctor (from Gates) to head up USAID. Meanwhile the UN system and others are wrapped around the Millenium Development Goals, which again, are beautiful goals, but vulnerable to that same charge of high budget, externally sourced technical fixes.
The cause for hope is that some of the compassionate projects are using sustainable approaches. If the cycle of disease transmission and infection (malaria, AIDs, dengue, etc) is truly broken, and new behaviors (sanitation, water source protection, sex, etc) become the new norm, the gains may stick.
In many ways it is a huge gamble whose outcome will take many years to manifest.
I think we will still need transformational approaches for development, inclusive of internally-owned adjustments to political economy and everyday values driving social, hygienic, subsistence, and economic activity.