![]() Warren Buffett’s Best Investment | Bill Gates. Our 2. 01. 7 annual letter is addressed to our dear friend Warren Buffett, who in 2. A few months ago, Warren asked us to reflect on what impact his gift has had on the world. Dear Bill and Melinda,Two years ago, I hit the 5. CEO of Berkshire and used the occasion to write a. I reflected on what had gone particularly well or. A. Accessible Access. The Reds are committed to providing every Guest with a comfortable and enjoyable experience at the ballpark. Great American Ball Park is a fully. I’d learned, and what I hoped would get done in the future. As you might guess, I ended up being the prime beneficiary of this effort. There’s nothing. like actually writing something out to clarify thinking. It’s now been ten years since what my children call “The Big Bang,” the day in 2. Music streaming service Spotify no longer officially supports Apple’s Safari browser, and Safari users who attempt to access it say they are being redirected to use.![]() I. made pledges to the five foundations, including yours. Having hit that milestone, I thought. I did. I’m not the only one who’d like to read it. There are many who want to know where you’ve. I also believe it’s important that people better. Your letter might explain how the two of you measure yourselves and how you. Your foundation will always be in the spotlight. It’s important, therefore, that it be well. And there is no better way to this understanding than personal and direct. Best to you both,What follows is our answer to him. It’s a story about the stunning gains the poorest people in the world have made over the last 2. This incredible progress has been made possible not only by the generosity of Warren and other philanthropists, the charitable giving of individuals across the world, and the efforts of the poor on their own behalf—but also by the huge contributions made by donor nations, which account for the vast majority of global health and development funding.
Our letter is being released amid dramatic political transitions in these countries, including new leadership in the United States and the United Kingdom. We hope this story will remind everyone why foreign aid should remain a priority—because by lifting up the poorest, we express the highest values of our nations. One of the greatest of those values is the belief that the best investment any of us can ever make is in the lives of others. As we explain to Warren in our letter, the returns are tremendous. Dear Warren. Our 2. Annual Letter. Bill and Melinda Gates | February 1. Dear Warren,Ten years ago, when we first got word of your gift to the foundation, we were speechless. It was the biggest single gift anyone ever gave anybody for anything. We knew we owed you a fantastic return on your investment. Of course, philanthropy isn’t like business. We don’t have sales and profits to show you. There’s no share price to report. But there are numbers we watch closely to guide our work and measure our progress. Our goals are shared by many other organizations working to save and improve lives. We’re all in this together. So most of the numbers we look at don’t focus just on how we as a foundation are doing, but on how the world is doing—and how we see our role. Warren, your gift doubled the foundation’s resources. It’s allowed us to expand our work in US education, support smallholder farmers, and create financial services for the poor. But in this letter, we’re going to tell you about our work in global health—because that was the starting point of our philanthropy, and it’s the majority of what we do. We’ll tell the story through the numbers that drive our work. Let’s start with the most important one: Our Favorite Number. Read Bill & Melinda Gates’s full 2. Annual Letter. 12. Million: The number of children’s lives saved since 1. If we could show you only one number that proves how life has changed for the poorest, it would be 1. Every September, the UN announces the number of children under five who died the previous year. Every year, this number breaks my heart and gives me hope. It’s tragic that so many children are dying, but every year more children live. More children survived in 2. More survived in 2. If you add it all up, 1. These are children who would have died if mortality rates had stayed where they were in 1. Here’s one of our favorite charts. It shows that the number of childhood deaths per year has been cut in half since 1. Melinda and I first started following these childhood mortality numbers more than 2. As you know, we’d taken a trip to Africa to see the wildlife, and we were startled by the poverty. When we came back, we began reading about what we’d seen. It blew our minds that millions of children in Africa were dying from diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria. Kids in rich countries don’t die from these things. The children in Africa were dying because they were poor. To us, it was the most unjust thing in the world. Saving children’s lives is the goal that launched our global work. It’s an end in itself. But then we learned it has all these other benefits as well. If parents believe their children will survive—and if they have the power to time and space their pregnancies—they choose to have fewer children. Saving children's lives is the goal that launched our global work."Read Bill & Melinda Gates’s full 2. Annual Letter"Saving children’s lives is the goal that launched our global work.". When a mother can choose how many children to have, her children are healthier, they’re better nourished, their mental capacities are higher—and parents have more time and money to spend on each child’s health and schooling. That’s how families and countries get out of poverty. This link between saving lives, a lower birthrate, and ending poverty was the most important early lesson Melinda and I learned about global health. This is why reducing childhood mortality is the heart of the work for us. Virtually all advances in society—nutrition, education, access to contraceptives, gender equity, economic growth—show up as gains in the childhood mortality chart, and every gain in this chart shows up in gains for society. Back in 2. 00. 1, after I gave a talk to a group of your friends about cutting childhood deaths, you told me that the foundation’s values and your values aligned. Saving children’s lives aligns with another one of your deepest values, Warren: using resources wisely and never wasting money when it can be avoided. Remember the laugh we had when we traveled together to Hong Kong and decided to get lunch at Mc. Donald’s? You offered to pay, dug into your pocket, and pulled out…coupons! Melinda just found this photo of me and “the big spender.” It reminded us how much you value a good deal. That’s why we want to point you to this number, 1. Saving children’s lives is the best deal in philanthropy. The Best Deal Is Vaccines.Read Bill & Melinda Gates’s full 2.Annual Letter. 86%: The percentage of children worldwide who receive basic vaccines.And if you want to know the best deal within the deal—it’s vaccines.Coverage for the basic package of childhood vaccines is now the highest it’s ever been, at 8. there. And the gap between the richest and the poorest countries is the lowest it’s ever been. Vaccines are the biggest reason for the drop in childhood deaths. Read Bill & Melinda Gates’s full 2. Annual Letter. Global Vaccination Coverage Is at Its Highest. They’re an incredible investment. The pentavalent vaccine, which protects against five deadly infections in a single shot, now costs under a dollar. And for every dollar spent on childhood immunizations, you get $4. That includes saving the money that families lose when a child is sick and a parent can’t work. For every dollar spent on childhood immunizations, you get $4. Read Bill & Melinda Gates’s full 2. Annual Letter"For every dollar spent on childhood immunizations, you get $4. At the start, we just couldn’t understand why vaccines weren’t available to every child who needed them. We were naïve. There were no market incentives to serve people, and we had never seen that before. The market wasn’t working for vaccines for poor kids because the families who needed them couldn’t afford them. But this gave us an opening. If we could create a purchasing fund so pharmaceutical companies would have enough customers, they’d have the market incentives to develop and produce vaccines. That’s the magic of philanthropy. It doesn’t need a financial return, so it can do things business can’t. But the limit of philanthropy is that the money runs out before the need is met. That’s why business and government have to play a role if the change is going to last. That led us to partner with business and government to set up Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, with the goal of getting vaccines to every child in the world.
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