Gates urges stepped up aid efforts

Bill Gates, addressing a Doha gathering, says he is optimistic about exploratory projects to help the poor around the world

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder turned full-time philanthropist, yesterday called for stepping up the pace of exploratory projects that are aimed to help the neediest around the world.

Speaking on the second day of the third International Conference on Information and Communications Technology and Development (ICTD 2009) in Doha, Gates said that he remained “optimistic” about the projects “overall”.

“The trend is on our side… the leaders, the students, they have the enthusiasm. We need to involve people from different domains of expertise, people from different disciplines,” Gates said.

“But we have to be very careful since a lot of these projects (aimed at the poor) are quite naive.”

As co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has been spending more time on global health and education work after retiring from day-to-day activities in Microsoft in June 2008.

Terming poverty “terrible”, Gates said the world was tapping higher IQ than it had ever done before.

“The great challenge is to figure out how a software can work in a rural setting. It takes individuals, philanthropists, the government, all coming together and even engaging the private sector to have some of their experience as well,” Gates said.

“ICT cannot solve all the problems. We will need a mix of things.”

Gates, who founded Microsoft in 1975, after dropping out of Harvard, also talked about the use of technology in health, education and reducing the level of corruption in governments.

“In 1960, 20mn children under the age of five died (a global child mortality rate of 20%). In 2006, the number was 10mn, considering also that the number of newborn has also doubled. That’s pretty phenomenal progress,” he said.

“But 10mn is still a terrible number. We can clearly target at reducing it to 5mn by 2025. That is possible simply by taking technologies that we already have or will clearly be invented in five years,” he added.

“This is why this Doha conference (ICTD 2009) is so important. I was looking forward to come here, to ask tough questions, understand ideas, looking at metrics,” Gates said at the Carnegie Mellon University in Education city, venue and host of the conference.