Update: And the winners are: Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University; Trish Millines-Dziko of Technology Access Foundation and John Wood of Room to Read.

Microsoft alumni have been a generous bunch. They've started at least 150 non-profits and given millions, if not billions, to causes from global health to education to equal rights.

Now the Microsoft Alumni Foundation is kicking off a new awards program to honor former employees working to improve the world through their philanthropy and socially motivated business.

On Wednesday evening, Bill and Melinda Gates will present the top three award winners as Integral Fellows, who will receive $25,000 each for the nonprofit of their choice. The finalists were chosen by a panel of judges -- former President Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Drayton, Pierre Omidyar, and Tom Tierney.

Of the 66 nominees, here are the six finalists:

Patrick Awuah of Ashesi University, an educational institution in Ghana whose mission is to educate African leaders of exceptional integrity and professional ability.

Peter Bladin of Grameen Foundation, which helps the world's poorest, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty through access to microfinance and technology.

Linda English of Learning for International NGOs (LINGOs), a consortium of over 40 international humanitarian relief, development, conservation and health organizations providing the latest learning technologies and courses from partners to increase the skill levels of the international nonprofit employees and the impact of their programs.

Tom Ikeda of Densho, The Japanese American Legacy Project, which helps students explore issues of democracy, intolerance, wartime hysteria, and the responsibilities of citizenship through the examination of the unjust World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Trish Millines Dziko of Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Seattle that is dedicated to preparing students of color for academic and professional success in today's technology-driven world.

John Wood of Room to Read, which partners with local communities in the developing world to provide quality educational opportunities by establishing libraries, creating local language children's literature, constructing schools, and providing education to girls.

It's a massive project taking shape during a steep decline in real estate development and commercial property values.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's new 900,000-square-foot headquarters, comprised initially of two six-story, boomerang-shaped buildings on 12 acres near the Seattle Center, is scheduled to be finished in April 2011 at an estimated cost of $500 million.

Update: The WSJ's Robert Frank asks: Does a charitable foundation need a $500 million complex?

The Gateses said Friday they are making a $350 million payment of personal funds into their foundation's $34 billion endowment for construction costs. The couple made the one-time payment to distinguish money for the campus from money they have given for grants.

The foundation purchased the parcel of land from the City of Seattle for about $50 million.

The construction project has been going on more than a year and is now about 40 percent complete. Here's a view of it from a live Web cam. It will house the foundation's nearly 800 employees, now working in five locations, and an 11,000-square-foot visitor center.

At the heart of the campus is an atrium six stories high that is completely open and enclosed by glass windows.

On the site at 500 Fifth Ave. N., 400 workers are busy welding steel, pouring concrete, operating now three cranes and reinforcing an underground sewer line. The building takes close to 7,000 tons of steel for the structure and more to reinforce the 67,000 yards of concrete. The project is being led by Sellen Construction based on a design by NBBJ architects.

Green building features include a living roof on the parking garage and a million-gallon rainwater storage tank to reduce water use. The project is aiming for a Gold rating in LEED Certification, an environmental building standard.

Taking a look at some other recent developments, the non-profit Mercy Corps completed its new global headquarters in Portland, transforming and expanding a historic downtown building at a cost of $37 million.

For its new headquarters in a building complex now under construction in South Lake Union, Amazon.com signed a deal to lease about 800,000 square feet for about $700 million, with an option to double that.

However, a recent national report predicted that the recession and bank troubles will continue to weigh down the Seattle market next year, with WaMu's collapse and new but mostly unoccupied office towers combining to push the downtown office-vacancy rate above 20 percent.

Northwestern Mutual bought the WaMu Center tower from JPMorgan Chase for $115 million, less than one-third of what it cost to build.

The Gates Foundation's headquarters is the biggest project in Brian Duke's 27 years at Sellen Construction, where he is senior superintendent.

The design and communications effort needed to pull it off is huge, he said.

Cranes operate in close proximity to high-voltage power lines. When winds are above 20 miles per hour, the cranes have to stop, which could slow progress over the winter. In the record heat this summer, temperatures on the steel decking reached 120 degrees.

One challenge was removing contaminated soil -- 600,000 tons of it, load by load. The soil and groundwater were contaminated from decades of fuel storage and vehicle maintenance.

Workers also had to rebuild part of a live sewer main in the middle of the project, he said. First they had to demolish an old brick manhole from the early 1900s, being careful not to damage the line, which runs underneath Republican and serves the South Lake Union neighborhood.

Duke said he draws inspiration from the foundation's charitable aims. "It makes it easier to come to work," he said. "Your job isn't just a construction worker; it has some meaning."

The Obama administration has found yet another job for Rajiv Shah, the former Gates Foundation executive who has spent the past five months at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

Shah, 36, has been nominated to head the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to reports quoting unnamed U.S. officials.

Shah was running the Gates Foundation's agriculture development program when he was tapped for the agricultural post as Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, as well as chief scientist, at the USDA.

Shah holds degrees in medicine and economics. A health care policy adviser on Al Gore's presidential campaign, Shah joined the Gates Foundation in 2001 where he worked as policy analyst and senior economist and developed an innovative program for vaccine financing. He served as director of strategic opportunities and deputy director of policy and finance for the global health program. While in Seattle, Shah served on the boards of the Seattle Public Library and the Seattle Community College District.

Meanwhile the top job at America's foreign assistance program has gone vacant for nine months at a time when the program and the Foreign Assistance Act need serious revamping, development experts say. The USAID's international affairs budget request for 2009 was close to $40 billion.

The Gates Foundation has shown its growing clout in the capital with Bill Gates among Obama's first visitors to the White House, influencing education policy, and Bill and Melinda Gates recently appearing before policy makers in Washington D.C., calling on them to maintain the U.S. commitment to foreign aid and global health funding.

Why Shah? It helps that he has already gone through the official vetting process, which has put off other candidates.

Senators John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Dick Lugar, the committee's top Republican, last month urged Obama to speed things up, saying that efforts to support the president's development agenda were being "hampered by a leadership vacuum" at USAID.

By Sandi Doughton

Lancet editor Dr. Richard Horton joked that his lecture at the University of Washington Monday night would be "metrics-free," but the outspoken Brit couldn't help making the case for better data to guide global health and development programs.

Many of the current darlings of philanthropy, such as microcredit, have little solid evidence to back them up, Horton said. One recent study in the Philippines concluded that the small loans did not improve community well-being and actually led to contraction of small businesses.

"These fashions that grip us in waves ... when you actually end up looking at the data can often seem to be very, very thin," he said.

When the book "Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There's a Better Way for Africa," argued that $1 trillion in international aid has only increased corruption, war and poverty, the development community had little to offer in rebuttal, Horton told the audience of faculty and students.

"We have badly failed to gather data on what a trillion of aid has done."

UW global health professor Steven Gloyd said he picked Horton to present the Steven Stewart Gloyd endowed lecture partly because of the UK-based Lancet's courage in publishing controversial papers, including one that estimated 650,000 civilians have been killed in the Iraq war, and one by researchers at the UW's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation that found many childhood vaccination numbers were inflated.

Horton, who works closely with IHME, is known for poking at the powerful, including the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. His journal recently published a critique of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's accountability and emphasis on technological solutions to global health problems.

But like everyone else in global health, the Lancet has received money from the giant philanthropy: $200,000 to publish a series on maternal and child mortality.

Horton said he'd like to see universities like the UW provide a forum where data on development and global health can be freely available - and critically evaluated.

The UW can also provide a counterbalance to Seattle's global health giant, the Gates Foundation, Horton said.

"I would hate it if Seattle was only seen as the center of technology in global health. The university can provide that added perspective to what comes out of the Northwestern U.S., and that's absolutely critical."

Amina S. Ali, African Union ambassador to the United States, made her first visit to Seattle this week, seeking to build bridges with Washington state institutions, which she says are playing a more important role in African business and development.

Ali, who is from Tanzania, represents an organization of 53 countries formed in 2002 and loosely based on the European Union, with the goal of helping integrate the continent to give it a stronger voice in the global economy while also addressing social, economic and political issues. The AU launched its first diplomatic mission in the U.S. in 2007.

Ali is the second high-level diplomat to come through Seattle in a week to meet the Gates Foundation, with a message to focus more on improving maternal health. Both Ali and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that the world's goal of improving the health of mothers and children is falling further behind.

The African Union is calling attention to the issue in a new campaign to reduce deaths of women in pregnancy and childbirth.

"We found for the last 10 years the donor community is focused on HIV/AIDS, and it's a stubborn problem," she said. "But there are other issues that confront women and children that nobody is talking about. There's no reason women in Africa should die in childbirth."

"We are thinking what can we do to bring women's issues to the top?" Part of the problem is a shortage of doctors and nurses, she said. Throughout parts of rural Africa, the ratio is 1 doctor to every 40,000 to 100,000 patients.

Like Ban, Ali also talked about the important role business can play in solving global issues. In Seattle, she met with Microsoft, the Trade Development Alliance and the African Chamber of Commerce.

Mobile phones are now helping medical diagnosis, she said. In Tanzania, patients living 1,000 miles from a city are using mobile phones to send information about illnesses and receive diagnosis.

For all the wrangling over trade with China, the U.S. should take a look at the way it's investing in Africa, she said.

"Americans should start to think why the Chinese have gone to Africa while the Americans have not taken advantage of that," she said. Americans have been more cautious, sitting on the sidelines. Chinese have been aggressively pursuing business, and while the relationship is not always easy, they are helping Africans solve key infrastructure problems, especially in building ports, she said.

One thing that has mitigated risk for the Chinese companies is a Chinese government development fund targeting Africa. The $10 billion China-Africa Development (CAD) fund aims to promote economic cooperation between China and Africa and advance Africa's economic development by providing money to Chinese companies starting ventures there.

Ali said she hopes the United States can create a similar, large fund to help American companies bridge the gap and start to invest more in the continent to transform its future.

Such a fund could go a lot further than simply giving money to government aid programs, she said. "Give the fund to your own people to invest in Africa," she said.

"It can be done," she said. "China 20 years ago -- it was nothing, and then the private sector decided to work with them. Let's try to work with Africa."

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving out $4 million in grants to help community foundations, libraries and legal aid services in Washington cope with the effects of recession.

The foundation is announcing a package of grants this morning aimed at local non-profits, including $672,000 to 10 community foundations. The money will help the foundations get government benefits to families, and fund programs to curb domestic violence and hunger.

Another $400,000 will go to the Washington State Library's "Renew Washington" grant program, funding 17 public libraries offering services to people looking for work. The libraries have seen a surge of people looking for information and resources during the downturn. The State Library will receive an additional $115,000 for advocacy, marketing and online training.

Another $3 million in Gates Foundation money will go to the Legal Aid for Washington Fund over the next three years. The fund provides legal support for state residents through a network of 26 nonprofit law centers. More than 80 percent of low-income households in the state need but can't afford legal services to deal with foreclosures, evictions, domestic violence and other problems, according to the foundation.

The 10 community foundations sharing $672,000 are the Blue Mountain Community Foundation, the Community Foundation of North Central Washington, the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington, the Grays Harbor Community Foundation, the Inland Northwest Community Foundation, the Orcas Island Community Foundation, the Skagit Community Foundation, the Three Rivers Community Foundation, the Whatcom Community Foundation and the Yakima Valley Community Foundation.

The Gates Foundation's local spending is still a small part of its overall giving. The foundation says it has given out about $20.4 billion in grants since 1994. Of that about $1.5 billion has gone to grants serving Washington state. Its budget for Pacific Northwest Initiatives is about $33 million this year, focusing on community organizations that address homelessness. Its work in Washington state also includes education and libraries. The foundation's total budget is about $3.5 billion.

Calling themselves "impatient optimists," Bill and Melinda Gates plan to talk directly to lawmakers and others in Washington D.C. tonight to push for continuing U.S. funding for global health.

CHUCK BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Gates will tout the success of foreign aid, including contributiosn to the GAVI Alliance, a global initiative to immunize children in poor countries, which has prevented an estimated 3.4 million deaths over the last decade.

"In our visits to developing countries, Bill and I have met countless people who are alive, healthy, and productive as a result of U.S. global health programs," Melinda Gates said today. "We want Americans to know how much their generosity is accomplishing, and how much it's appreciated."

U.S. spending on global health has increased steadily, but it still makes up less than one percent of the federal budget. It was close to $8 billion this year, up from $1.5 billion in 2001.

The U.S. has started some ambitious development projects, even though the country's top post on foreign aid remains unfilled, and many pressing issues are vying for resources and attention.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has become an increasingly important and active player in global health and development. Its annual budget is more than $3.5 billion, and about half of that goes toward global health. The United Nation's annual budget is just under $4.2 billion.

The couple started a project called Living Proof to promote the success such funding has achieved in developing countries. Positive stories about foreign aid aren't getting told, they say.

The Gates Foundation has spent about $12 billion on global health since 1994.

Their aim is to cut the number of child deaths in half worldwide by 2025. Preventable deaths of children under five have declined worldwide to about 9 million in 2007 from 12.6 million in 1990, despite population growth, according to this report.

The presentation will be webcast live at www.livingproofproject.org at 4 p.m. Pacific.

Add two new weapons to the potential arsenal against malaria -- chewing gum and chocolate.

They are among dozens of unconventional approaches to global health problems that won backing today from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is giving out 76 grants of $100,000 each to researchers in 16 countries.

The awards known as Grand Challenges Explorations, smaller and riskier bets the foundation is making to encourage creativity among scientists around the world, include people in areas such as chemistry, engineering, statistics and business who have never focused on health before.

The third round of projects explore new low-cost ways to diagnose diseases, fight malaria and HIV, and find more effective vaccines. Among the winners:

• Andrew Fung of the University of California, Los Angeles, aims to develop chewing gum that can detect the presence of malaria in a person's saliva. Fung calls his diagnostic tool "MALiVA." During chewing, particles in the gum will react with malaria proteins, which can be detected and characterized when the gum is scanned with a magnet.
• Kate Edwards at the University of San Diego will study whether a brief bout of exercise can make a pneumonia vaccine work better.
• Steven Maranz of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York will test a compound contained in chocolate to find out whether providing children high levels of flavanols, found in chocolate, green tea and nuts, deprives malaria parasites of lipids needed to survive, keeping the infection at levels low enough to elicit a strong immune response and build lifelong immunity.
• Ranjan Nanda of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology in India will attempt to create a handheld "electronic nose" that gathers and analyzes breath samples to diagnose tuberculosis.
• Margaret Njoroge of Med Biotech Laboratories in Uganda will develop a nasal vaccine for mothers, designed to induce antibodies against malaria in breast milk and pass that immunity on to their babies.
• Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are attempting to marry a microscope with a cell phone to capture high-contrast fluorescent images of malaria parasites, with software on the phone that can count the parasites and wirelessly transmit the results to clinics.

The foundation is currently considering applications for the fourth round of funding, which closes on Nov. 2, and it's adding a new topic this time around -- new technologies for birth control.

Seeking novel solutions to an old problem, the foundation notes that family planning is one of the most cost effective ways to reduce deaths among mothers and children, but 200 million women in developing countries lack effective contraception.

So far, 262 researchers from 30 countries have been awarded grants through the Grand Challenges program, a five-year, $100 million initiative to promote innovation in global health.

Since the projects are so experimental, I'll be interested to see how the first ones have fared a year after their initial funding, and whether any of them are going on to the next stage in November. Successful projects can compete for a follow-on grant of $1 million or more, but no such grants have been awarded yet.

By Sandi Doughton

Health experts around the globe were chilled earlier this year by the discovery that malaria in Cambodia has evolved resistance to the most promising drug in medicine's arsenal.

With the effectiveness of artemisinin under threat, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is stepping up its investment in new malaria drugs with a $115 million grant to the Geneva-based Medicines for Malaria Venture. The grant brings the foundation's total funding for the group to $317 million.

Malaria has long been a top priority for the Gateses, who in 2007 took the controversial step of calling for eradication of the disease. Many experts question whether that will ever be possible, but foundation CEO Jeff Raikes recently said the world's biggest philanthropy is refocusing its malaria programs with the goal of eradication in mind.

The "E-word," which some malaria scientists utter with trepidation based on past failures, is repeated three times in MMV's four-paragraph press release on the new grant.

In February, MMV and drugmaker Novartis introduced a sweet-tasting version of the combination malaria drug Coartem for African children. The group is funding work on more than 50 drug candidates, ten of which are in clinical development.

Food quantity or food quality? Can the world quell starvation now and still have a healthy ecosystem over the long term?

Tough questions for anyone concerned about agriculture and its relation to hunger and poverty.

In a keynote speech at the World Food Prize symposium today, Bill Gates said he supports sustainable agriculture, welcome words to experts in the field, who say there is no short term fix.

Much as he changed the landscape on health, the world's richest philanthropist is trying to spark a new revolution in agriculture. The first Green Revolution improved crop yields, but at the expense of the environment. This time, there may be a chance to get it right.

"Sustainability takes more time, more learning, more people," said John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science at Washington State University. "In the long run it pays huge dividends."

"I really like the fact that here we have this huge philanthropic foundation and they're really trying to help Africa and South Asia," he said. "I don't mind hearing we want to feed people, we want to raise yields, improve their income, get roads and markets in there."

But Reganold said he would like to hear more about how sustainability will be measured and valued. "We tend to go in and say wow, we improved yields," he said. "That's great because these people need to eat. At the same time I'd like to hear wow, we improved the soil so that down the road they're going to be better off."

"They say the right thing, but I'm not sure they're doing the right thing yet," said Hans Herren, a Swiss scientist who won the World Food Prize in 1995. Both Herren and Reganold are attending this year's conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

Gates said in his speech that in their zeal for an ideal environment, some people "have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."

Research into plant genetics is worthwhile, Herren said, but critics of its current usefulness in Africa shouldn't be vilified.

"What I think is wrong is to blame the people who question the utility now as the bad guys responsible for hunger," he said. "Look at the people who have quadrupled yield in perfectly good agriculturally sound systems. Why is this not taken as the example, not to multiply everywhere but as the basis to adapt to different systems?"

Herren took issue with the notion that ecological agriculture is a luxury for rich countries.

"The idea that is deeply ingrained is that the poor can't afford it. That's really a big problem and it's not true. To do it the right way is cheaper because you don't get in debt in the future," he said, by buying more expensive seeds and fertilizers.

More global investment is needed in sustainable agriculture, as well as policies to correct fundamental imbalances in trade and access to resources, he said.

Gates Foundation Chief Executive Jeff Raikes has deeply personal ties to agriculture. He grew up on a farm outside of Omaha, Nebraska, that has belonged to his family for generations. Raikes counted Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, among his heroes.

Earlier this year Raikes paid a visit to Borlaug at his home in Texas. Raikes had wanted to meet Borlaug at the World Food Prize gathering in Iowa, but he knew Borlaug's illness would make it impossible for him to attend. Borlaug passed away Sept. 12.

Borlaug was having some trouble with his hearing, but overall "he was doing amazingly well for somebody who is 94 years old battling cancer."

JAMES A. FINLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nobel Peace Prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, pictured in 2005.

Raikes' burning question - what went wrong in Africa?

"When I asked him about Africa he immediately launched into a discussion about the importance of maintaining the investments and the commitment to wheat rust," Raikes said.

Last year, the Gates Foundation gave Cornell University $27 million to create a global partnership to combat the disease, called the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project.

A particularly virulent strain, called Ug99 because it was first seen in Uganda in 1999, has spread from Africa and can infect crops in hours. Clouds of invisible spores can be carried by the wind for hundreds of miles.

Borlaug's concern about the wheat rust problem reflected something larger, Raikes said. "What he was saying is that governments had not maintained their commitment to international agricultural development at the level they should have."

"What I took away from that conversation was how important it was to maintain the commitment to invest in agriculture when things like the opportunity for higher yield crops that better withstand wheat rust or drought are very important to food security."

Raikes sat with him for over an hour. While Borlaug had recently undergone chemotherapy and didn't get up from his chair, "his level of energy was quite impressive," Raikes said.

Borlaug is one of only a handful of people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

When Raikes visited, Borlaug's family was in the process of moving the awards from their safety deposit box to Texas A&M University, and showed Raikes the Congressional medal.

On the back of the medal is Borlaug's famous creed: "The first essential component for social justice is adequate food for all mankind."

Raikes accidentally dropped the medal, which landed on Borlaug's knee.

"I tested his reflexes and his reflexes were great," Raikes laughed.

Alexander Friedman, chief financial officer of the world's largest private foundation, says he's leaving next year to pursue other interests.

Friedman, CFO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced his intention to leave early next year in an e-mail today to colleagues at the foundation, calling the move a personal decision.

A former investment banker at Lazard, Friedman said he would most likely return to the private sector, but he is also considering government and non-profit work.

He presided over a period of rapid, sometimes tumultuous growth after billionaire investor Warren Buffett pledged to give the foundation most of his fortune, then estimated at more than $30 billion. Over the past year Friedman has had to steer the foundation's budget through the economic crisis, and he recently launched its first foray into program related investing, which I wrote about here.

"I was really brought in to help the organization scale," he said in an interview, adding that when he started in March of 2007, the foundation had less than half of its current payout (now about $3.5 billion) and about a third of its current headcount (now 781 employees).

"The real thing is I made a personal decision when I came here that it would be a tremendous honor to work with Patty [Stonesifer] and Bill and Melinda [Gates] as the foundation doubled in size, and that was an exciting challenge for me and we have pretty much done that."

Friedman would not say if he was considering any specific offers but said he wanted to give the foundation time to plan for his departure.

"I feel great about the experience here and super positive about the organization," he said.

Friedman said he will remain at the foundation until about February to make sure the 2010 budget is finalized and work handed over to the next CFO "as responsibly as possible." He said he intends to stay in the Seattle area "for the foreseeable future."

"To resort to a CFO-like phrase for a moment, my 'bottom line' is that I came here to try and accomplish a set of discrete goals and to contribute to the development of strong strategies and operational procedures," he wrote in his email to colleagues.

"I am proud to have been part of the team that strove for these goals and made real progress on our collective agenda. Now, it is with great excitement that I begin to think about what comes next."

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said it would pay its next CEO more than its first, it wasn't kidding. While Patricia Stonesifer received a salary of just $1 during her decade-long tenure, the current foundation Chief Executive Jeffrey Raikes receives the largest compensation of any CEO among 49 private foundations surveyed by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Raikes did not earn as much as the chief investment officers at foundations smaller than the Gates Foundation.

Stonesifer and Raikes were both early Microsoft employees who earned their fortunes building the software company. Stonesifer refused to take a salary at the philanthropy. When Raikes was hired, the Gates Foundation said it did not want to maintain a precedent of not paying its chief executive.

Raikes, who joined the Gates Foundation a year ago, earned $315,403 from September through December 2008, making his annualized salary $990,000, according to the Chronicle.

A Gates Foundation spokesperson confirmed the compensation figures and said the philanthropy's co-chairs, Bill and Melinda Gates, set the CEO salary "after considering industry standards and what they believe is fair for leading a philanthropic organization of this size and scale."

Other foundation executives earning top salaries include Joan E. Spero, former president of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with compensation of $768,525.

In several cases the chief investment officer earned more than the CEO, such as the $1.6 million compensation of Laurance R. Hoagland Jr. at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; $1.4 million paid to John Moehling at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, or the $1.2 million paid to Susan Manske at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Chronicle reported.

At the Gates Foundation, Tadataka Yamada, president of the global health program, earned $848,390.

The Ford Foundation, which is one-third the size of the Gates Foundation in assets, paid its president, Luis A. Ubinas, $718,084, and vice president, Linda Strumpf, $1,113,590.

Among heads of other non-profits, the highest paid executives include:

James Mongan, chief executive of Partners HealthCare System in Boston, with compensation of $2.7 million in 2008, a 99 percent increase over his 2007 pay.

Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, with compensation of $2.1 million in 2008, more than twice his 2007 pay, plus a housing allowance worth $336,000.

The report also shows that the gap in pay between leaders at large non-profits and small charities has grown. Consistently bigger raises over the past several years mean CEOs at larger non-profits now earn almost 10 times as much as those at small ones, according to GuideStar, a research organization that tracks nonprofits.

A gender pay gap persisted among charities, where women held 47 percent of the CEO positions, but received only 35 percent of the total compensation.

Locally, two executives of Seattle non-profits made the Chronicle list for having part of their compensation in the form of a bonus or cash incentive. The Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) paid President and CEO Christopher Elias $505,129 in total compensation in 2008, including a bonus of $99,561.

At the Casey Family Programs, CEO William C. Bell was paid $567,307, including a bonus of $109,675.

Among the local charities working internationally, World Vision President Richard Stearns received $336,472, and World Vision Senior Vice President Atul Tandon was paid $213,061.

United Way King County CEO Jonathan Fine was paid $242,122, the 19th highest of the 40 United Way leaders around the country. King County is the third largest United Way by income size.

Seattle's business community should consider homeless people as valuable assets, and tackle homelessness not as charity but as an investment in the future, the head of the world's largest philanthropy said today.

"Homeless people aren't just a problem to be minimized or cleared away," Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes said, addressing more than 900 members of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. "They have amazing potential."

THOMAS JAMES HURST/SEATTLE TIMES

Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes has taken part in the One Night Count of the homeless population in Seattle for several years.

The chamber's new slogan for "It's Time for Business" could apply to the problem of homelessness, too, he said.

Half of Seattle's homeless population are parents in their prime productive years, with children in their prime development years.

In fact, homeless families tracked by the University of Washington had better high school graduation rates than the Seattle School District, he said.

"Most homeless families are right on the edge of being a productive part of a healthy community and a thriving economy," he said.

Raikes called for a new approach that would take some money being spent on shelters and put it into permanent homes, a careful needs assessment for each family instead of a standard response for everyone, more affordable housing, and an emphasis on preventing people from becoming homeless, such as short-term rent subsidies.

Seattle is the second most expensive metropolitan area in the country, he said. Building more affordable housing would be good for the construction industry and add jobs.

In King County, there are about 10,000 people who are homeless, but tens of thousands more barely able to keep themselves afloat. They earn half the median income and spend half of that on housing.

Close to 50,000 people are "living on the border of economic stability and destitution," he said.

Given a safe place to sleep, combined with services to address the root cause of becoming homeless, three-quarters of the 1,500 families in a Sound Families program moved on to permanent stable housing, Raikes said.

He called for expanding that model, and asked business people to volunteer their ideas and expertise and to support local government leaders to put homelessness on the political radar.

Note: Yes, Seattle really is the second most expensive metropolitan area in the country, based on Federal Housing Finance Agency 2Q 2009 purchase prices, beating out New York and second only to San Jose/San Francisco.

Is the $8 billion the U.S. spends on foreign aid for global health worth it?

Bill and Melinda Gates say they've seen proof that it is. They're starting a new campaign today called "Living Proof" to convince Americans that their money has been a good investment, saving millions of people in developing countries.

Their message is that those children and adults are surviving and leading more productive lives, "living proof" that U.S-supported initiatives to fight malaria, AIDS, and other diseases are working.

The Gates Foundation has started a major ad campaign that will run over the next five weeks, aimed primarily at policy makers in Washington DC.

Cynthia Lewis, a senior program officer at the foundation, said the couple was struck by the disconnect between the optimism and progress they saw on their trips and the pessimism they were hearing about when they came home.

"When we talk to people in America they don't know where their money has gone or that it's working," achieving major declines in child mortality, she said.

Following media images of crying and emaciated children that helped the world see the problems of poverty and disease, this campaign will show the other side, featuring people like a woman with HIV in Ethiopia who gets treatment, starts her own barber shop and teaches others about HIV/AIDS while they're sitting in her chair.

"For quite a number of years people who advocate have focused on the need," said Iain Simpson, a global health spokesman for the foundation. "That's been a very effective campaign. What we've forgotten collectively to do is come back and say these investments we asked you to make have had a fantastic impact on peoples lives."

The U.S. government spent about $30 billion on foreign aid since 2008, about 1 percent of the U.S. budget, and of the total foreign aid, about $8 billion goes toward health programs.

The U.S. approach to foreign aid has been criticized by various groups, including Global Washington, which asserts that it needs to conform to local priorities and be more transparent.

The programs that will be highlighted by the Gates Foundation include the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is credited with saving an estimated 1.2 million people by expanding access to HIV prevention and treatment.

Programs supported by U.S. foreign aid delivered 88 million insecticide-treated bednets to protect young children from malaria, life-saving TB treatment programs in 41 developing countries, malaria prevention and treatment for 32 million people and fortified food for tens of millions of children in developing countries, according to the campaign.

Lewis acknowledged it was a difficult case to make to Americans even before the economic downturn hit.

"We think if more Americans learn about progress in global health, they'll be inspired to maintain these investments--even in difficult economic times--so that we can do even more," Melinda Gates said in a statement.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is planning to use its massive endowment to offer $400 million in new low-interest loans, loan guarantees and equity investments.

It's a significant step by the world's largest private charity to use more of its $30 billion in assets to finance program-related investing. I first wrote about the idea here.

The $400 million will be used for a range of new opportunities, including charter school expansion, agricultural financing for small farmers in Africa, and investment in global health technologies, according to people familiar with the plan.

The program-related investments or PRIs will be managed by Gates Foundation Chief Financial Officer Alexander Friedman and his staff. The Gates Foundation will seek partners for joint investments, aligned with its strategies in areas such as global health, U.S. education, agricultural development and financial services for the poor, to more than double the total funding.

U.S. foundations have hundreds of billions of dollars in their endowments, but pay out just 5 percent of the total each year. Meanwhile the economic downturn has forced them to think about new ways to achieve their charitable goals. Foundation endowments plunged an average of 26 percent last year.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing more with its money than giving it away. It has been moving into investments, loans and loan guarantees aimed at furthering its programs.

The $30 billion foundation has made several investments so far and others are in the works, as I reported in this story today.

Program related investments or PRIs are one way the Gates Foundation can increase its impact beyond the $3.5 billion a year it makes in grants. The approach also imposes financial discipline on recipients so they operate more like businesses.

What will be most interesting to watch is to what extent the foundation uses its $30 billion endowment towards its charitable goals. It plans to carve off a portion of the endowment to invest in ventures related to its programs, but has not released details about how that will work..

That step could mark a shift from the strategy of the past several years in which it invested its endowment, or asset trust, solely with the goal of maximizing profit.

The next PRI could be a loan guarantee towards U.S. education.

PRIs are set up to further the charitable mission of a nonprofit, not to make money. They are risky and the default risk rises in a bad economy, but they can also be very profitable. The investor can also call in the loan if the recipient is not adhering to the stated mission.

Examples could be a low interest or no interest loan to needy students, an investment in a low-income housing project or a loan to a for-profit pharmaceutical company. In fact a new designation called an L3C, or a low-profit limited liability company, has been created to facilitate such program investments.

The Gates Foundation has made least three program-related investments in the area of global development: $20 million to Africa ProCredit Holding to increase access to banking services for micro entrepreneurs, small businesses and low income groups; $20 million to ASA International Holdings to scale up a proven microfinance model in several countries in Africa and Asia; and $10 million to Opportunity Transformation Investments to create or expand commercial banks for the poor across five African countries.

They are not the same as mission-related investments, which align investment of assets with a charity's mission, and include actions by shareholders to affect the behavior of companies, said Lance Lindblom, chief executive of the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

The Gates Foundation came under fire in 2007 following a report that it was investing in companies contributing to health problems and other human suffering the foundation was working to alleviate through its grants. At the time, the Gates Foundation said it would not alter its approach to investing its endowment.

When screening companies for behavior contrary to a foundation's mission, sorting out responsibility can be difficult, Lindblom said. He advocates that foundations exercise their proxy votes to persuade companies they invest in to act more responsibly.

The current investments of the Gates Foundation's endowment trust can be found here.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making its largest grant to date in the financial services space -- $35 million to help set up a global network to help the poor gain access to savings accounts and other financial tools.

The grant announced today will create the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, a coalition of bankers and policy makers from developing countries, aiming to expand savings accounts, insurance and other financial services to people living on less than $2 a day.

The alliance is based in Bangkok and managed by the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the recipient of the Gates grant.

The Gates Foundation has invested $350 million so far in financial services for the poor, a relatively new program for the world's largest private philanthropy. Gates started with a broad approach that included credit and insurance, but has narrowed it down in the last year to focus mainly on savings.

Microcredit, making very small loans to poor entrepreneurs, has captured the world's attention and billions of dollars in donations and investment.

Savings accounts are at least as important as credit, but efforts to expand savings are not being funded, says
Bob Christen, who directs the Gates Foundation's financial services initiative.

Not everyone is an entrepreneur -- among the poor are legions of maids, day laborers, factory workers and others who don't run their own businesses, he said.

The problem for many low income people is they have no safe place to put their money. Banks don't consider it cost effective to take the tiny amounts they are able to save. And many microfinance organizations that give out loans are not licensed to take deposits from the public.

The newly funded alliance will share information about innovative ways to help people save money, such as allowing retail stores, post offices and mobile phone networks to receive deposits and process bank transactions. "We believe virtually everyone could use a deposit account," Christen said.

Jeff Raikes, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's chief executive, once said he learned about computer programming at Stanford in order to help his brother, Ron, who was running the family farm in Nebraska.

The two brothers bought an Apple II and programmed it to handle the farm's accounting. Jeff Raikes went on to work at Apple and then spent 27 years at Microsoft, while his older brother Ron remained at home in Nebraska to head a large cattle operation and grow corn, soybeans and wheat.

It was at the family farm where Ron Raikes died in an accident Saturday after getting caught under a piece of farm equipment. His funeral will be held today in Lincoln.

Ron Raikes became a state senator in 1997 and served for 11 years. He earned a doctorate in agricultural economics at the University of California-Davis and taught agricultural economics at Iowa State University before taking over the helm of the farm from his father in the late '70s.

The younger Raikes, who had thought he would return to rural Nebraska but stayed in Seattle, now heads the world's largest private foundation helping shape agricultural development around the world.

Billions of people around the world eat rice as a daily staple. To make it more nutritious,
Seattle-based PATH is taking ordinary rice, blending it with micro nutrients and molding it into fortified rice-like grains.

PATH's new Ultra Rice is being introduced around the world to solve vitamin and mineral deficiencies that cause a host of health problems, from birth defects to blindness.

PHOTO COURTESY OF PATH

Ultra Rice in bins ready for serving to a school in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India.

Tomorrow the Technology Museum of Innovation in San Jose is recognizing the global health non-profit's work on Ultra Rice with a 2009 Tech Award, given to innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

It will be the third Tech Award PATH has received from the museum. PATH was a Health Award Laureate for its heat-sensitive vaccine vial monitor in 2007 and for its pre-filled Uniject syringes for vaccine delivery in 2003.

Ultra Rice was pioneered by a local father-and-son team, Dr. James P. Cox and his son, R. W. Duffy Cox. at Lynden-based Bon Dente International, the creators of technologies from oyster shucking equipment to methods of eliminating salmonella in eggs. In 1997, the Cox family donated the Ultra Rice patent to PATH.

PHOTO COURTESY OF PATH

School girls in a meal program in India eat fortified Ultra Rice developed by Seattle-based PATH.

Ultra Rice is now being developed by PATH under Project Director Dipika Matthias, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. PATH has already introduced Ultra Rice into large-scale meal programs funded by governments to test its benefits.

PATH launched a pilot program in December with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Naandi Foundation in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Success depends on how effectively Ultra Rice can be commercialized. PATH is now trying to demonstrate successful models of supply and demand.

The non-profit partners with local pasta manufacturers to produce the Ultra Rice grains and works with rice millers and government food programs to blend and distribute the fortified rice.

It has licensed the technology to commercial partners in Brazil, India and Colombia, who are required to make their Ultra Rice grains available to public-sector buyers and consumers at preferential prices. PATH expects the price of fortified rice to be between 2 and 5 percent higher than the cost of traditional rice.

Longevity Vita Bio-Tech, PATH's first commercial partner in China, plans to integrate pasta-extrusion machinery into its Beijing factory to produce Ultra Rice grains. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention owns part of Longevity Vita and will help introduce the product in China, according to PATH.

Besides PATH, previous Tech Award winners in health include DataDyne, which developed an open-source program for healthcare workers to collect and share data using mobile devices, and MedMira, which invented technology for a single test to detect HIV and hepatitis in three minutes.

The Tech Award winners are honored at an annual gala in San Jose, and one laureate in each award category receives a $50,000 cash prize. This year's awards gala will be held on Nov. 19.

Dr. Stefano Bertozzi is joining the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation next week as its new HIV director in the global health program.

An expert in health economics, he will manage grants in HIV vaccine development, biomedical prevention research, diagnostics, development and resistance monitoring, and strategies for introduction and scaling-up of interventions, the foundation said.

HIV is one of the biggest programs at the foundation, which has spent nearly $12 billion on global health since 1994.

For the past 11 years Bertozzi has worked in the National Institute of Public Health (INSP) in Mexico as the director of its Center for Evaluation Research & Surveys, where he leads economics and statistics teams that conduct impact evaluations of large health and social programs.

He also chairs the Steering Committee of aids2031, an international consortium of people from diverse backgrounds looking for new ideas for the global response against HIV/AIDS. I found this video of him in which he talked about the need for a new approach to HIV that is longer term, and building more efficient management systems.

"We've been so caught up in the urgency of people dying that we haven't thought about how to win this fight over the long term," he said.... "It's foolish for us to take an emergency response to prevention."

Bertozzi co-authored this paper that discusses the spread of HIV from sex workers whose clients are willing to pay more not to have to use a condom.

"His intimate knowledge of the medicine, science, economics and policy of HIV will help make this important portfolio have the most impact," said Tachi Yamada, president of the Gates Foundation's global health program. Bertozzi worked with the foundation in his previous roles at UNAIDS, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank.

Charles "Chip" Lyons is leaving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to head a foundation working to fight HIV/AIDS in children.

Lyons, who is director of special initiatives in the Gates Foundation's Global Development program, has been named president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, based in Washington D.C., the Glaser foundation announced.

He will start the new job in January, succeeding Pamela Barnes.

Accepting his new role, Lyons said, "I am delighted to join the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Its exceptional worldwide reputation and the extraordinary impact it has made in the lives of women and children in those countries hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic should be applauded."

In 2007, the Elizabeth Glaser foundation received a five-year, $9.7 million Gates Foundation grant to research and develop potential vaccines for the prevention of HIV infection in children.

Before joining the Gates Foundation, Lyons worked for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) -- as program officer in Mozambique, chief of staff to the executive director at UNICEF headquarters and as president and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Lyons joins a number of senior executives departing the Gates Foundation this year or leaving the Seattle office.

Heidi Sinclair left her position as chief communications officer in February and started her own consulting firm. Rajiv Shah left his post as the Gates Foundation director of agricultural development in May to join the U.S. Department of Agriculture as under secretary and chief scientist, and Joe Cerrell, director of global health policy and advocacy, will leave Seattle in January to head the foundation's new European office in London.

Deborah Jacobs went from helping build Seattle's state-of-the-art Central Library to visiting libraries overseas with no heat or running water and budgets as low as $30 a month.

In her first year on the job at the Gates Foundation, she has directed an expanding program called the Global Libraries Initiative, which aims to improve free access to computers and the Internet in public libraries.

Today she is presenting a $1 million prize to a foundation in Medellín, Colombia, for its innovative use of technology in libraries to promote community development.

GREG GILBERT/SEATTLE TIMES

After more than a decade as City Librarian in Seattle, Deborah Jacobs now manages the global libraries program at the Gates Foundation.

In her travels over the past year Jacobs said she has seen "absolute heroism and commitment to what libraries can do," in places where "librarians are having to close the door to go across fields to their house to get warm water or go to the toilet or wash their hands."

"A million dollars feels like a lot of money to a library system," she said.

The Fundación Empresas Públicas de Medellín, or EPM Foundation, won the Gates 2009 Access to Learning Award.

The network of 34 libraries is part of a regional initiative to use technology to increase the transparency of government, create a competitive business environment and improve education. It serves patrons from low-income communities where people have no computers at home.The network includes five library parks throughout the city that serve as cultural centers with educational resources and training programs for how to use computers and the Internet.

The EPM Foundation's efforts have contributed to the revitalization of Colombia's second largest city, Jacobs said, and its work can be a model for other communities.

"As a librarian I really recognize that libraries with computers can open the doors to people, help people feel a sense of inclusion and greater connection with the broader world," she said. It has also made libraries busier than ever.

The number of library visitors in Medellín's network has jumped from 90,000 to more than 500,000 per month, and the program has helped reduce the individual-to-computer ratio from 140:1 in 2005, to 47:1 in 2008, according to the Gates Foundation.

The EPM program will use the Gates award to increase its library network, develop additional training programs and expand its services.

Apart from the annual award, the Gates Foundation has made about $230 million in grants to library programs in 10 countries as part of its Global Development program -- in Chile, Mexico, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Vietnam, Poland, Botswana, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

Unlike other programs where applicants themselves submit requests for grants, the foundation first identifies a country whose library system is suitable for the Gates program, Jacobs said, and then foundation representatives begin contacting government officials. The Gates Foundation targets countries making investments in their public library systems.

"The government has to show generally they are willing to prepare buildings for new technology," she said, which could include putting in new roofs and heating systems, bringing in furniture and providing last-mile Internet connectivity to the building. "We're seeing governments are really beginning to understand the importance of technology in their towns even under bad economic times."

In some cases, the library funding overlaps with other Gates Foundation work, such as financial services, agriculture and health. In Botswana, the global library initiative works in tandem with a comprehensive AIDS program that is also funded by the Gates Foundation, she said. The Botswana libraries offer books and training on HIV prevention and even provide condoms.

COURTESY OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION/PATRICIA RINCON

Professor Alejandro Lobo Santamaria helps students practice their computer skills in a library created inside a series of donated train cars. The program received a $1 million award this week from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. .

The Gates global library program has a partnership with Microsoft, which has donated software to all 10 countries where the Gates Foundation has made grants, totaling about $30 million.

After the Gates Foundation makes the grant for computers and training, the country has an option to request a donation of software from Microsoft, said Tom Murphy, public relations director for Corporate Citizenship at Microsoft. All of the libraries have taken the offer of software, made through Microsoft's technology donations program for non-profits, he said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $4.8 million to a project to identify new methods of on-site sanitation in developing countries.

The grant to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine supports a three-year project to research and develop new concepts for sanitation such as improving pit latrines, which are the only option for about 1.7 billion people without access to sewage systems. The London School will research how advances in biotechnology, using enzymes and micro-organisms to convert plant waste to biofuel, for example, might be applied to sanitation.

The London School also received the $1 million Gates Award for Global Health this year.

The Gates Foundation's program on water, sanitation and hygiene is only about three years old but has grown to 19 grants so far totaling about $160 million.

Unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene are leading causes of illness and death in the developing world. Improving them could prevent one tenth of global diseases, according to the World Health Organization. About 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses every year.

With its water-related grants, the Gates Foundation has funded low-cost, practical solutions that can be commercialized.

Among the recipients is Seattle-based PATH, which is exploring water quality through a $17 million, five-year grant to help develop low-cost filters, gadgets and other water-treatment products.

In 2008 the foundation gave $13 million to an international consortium led by the University of Bristol to develop Aquatest, a simple diagnostic tool that can give a reliable indication of whether water sampled is safe or not.

Since little research has focused on the development and use of pit latrines, the London School said it aims to build knowledge about decomposition processes and evaluate the potential of biotechnology and improved design to accelerate decomposition.

Its goal is to find solutions that can be turned into affordable, sustainable products available on the market. Researchers say such innovations can improve health and reduce costs for sanitation in an environmentally safe manner. The project will combine academic and industrial expertise and provide an innovation fund to turn promising ideas into prototypes.

Locally another non-profit, Seattle-based Water 1st, has been working on projects that integrate water supply, sanitation and health education in four countries, taking safe water as the basis for ending poverty.

Jeff Raikes has kept a pretty low profile in his first year as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The man who built Microsoft Office now runs the largest private foundation in the world, which gives out more than $3 billion a year from an endowment of $30 billion.

Raikes recently talked about the fallout of the economic crisis on the foundation, the importance of risk taking and failure in philanthropy, and his experience working with Melinda Gates, which he said has been the most fun. He spoke at a breakfast last week sponsored by the Puget Sound Business Journal. (I couldn't get in, but thanks to the Seattle Channel I was able to watch it here).

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

Jeff Raikes grew up a "farm kid" in Nebraska and later gave up a job at Apple to join Microsoft in 1981. "Steve Jobs yelled at me, telling me that Microsoft was going to go out of business," Raikes said.

Not a lot of what he said was new, but he did reveal some insights from his first year, including how serious the stock market plunge hit the Gates Foundation.

"The biggest impact by far is on our partners and the people that our partners and we strive to serve," he said. "It's one of those things if you think about it you get a little depressed."

On Jan. 1, 2008, the Gates Foundation's endowment was $39 billion. In just one year it had dropped to $30 billion.

"That's nine billion," Raikes said. "Part of that is the payout, part of that is the drop in the market. Let's say you have another 10 percent drop in the market. We're paying out $3.5 billion in direct charitable activity. Jan 1, 2010, we're now at $23 billion."

"At one point in time I thought that was the scenario I was looking at," he said. "The good news is the market has come back. The situation isn't quite as dire as it was a few months ago."

"At the end of the day we're very fortunate that Melinda and Bill took a deep breath and decided we're going to keep investing." The foundation's direct charitable giving is up about 10 percent this year, and its endowment stood at $30.2 billion at the end of June.

But the crisis has forced a renewed focus on top priorities, Raikes said, namely the biggest killers of children in the developing world -- HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea.

"We have to figure out how we can keep the momentum going in the short term while recognizing we have to conserve financial resources for the long term," he said.

One of the most important things he's learned in the first year is how the role of philanthropy differs from business and government.

"The private sector certainly is important but appropriately driven by the profit motive... government has the responsibility to provide services to raise the overall standard of life... You really don't like the government doing risky things with your tax dollars."

The Gates Foundation will take on some risky ventures and challenging ideas that government couldn't take on alone, he said.

"There are going to be times because we're taking risks we will fail... that's part of our role," though the goal is to succeed, Raikes said. "It's not that different frankly from how we operated at Microsoft."

Billionaire Warren Buffett, who is giving the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, told Raikes the foundation shouldn't be succeeding all the time. Raikes understood the message, but said it's another thing to try to pass it down.

"Warren would say swing for the fence," Raikes said, using a baseball metaphor. "But I've got the 700 or 800 employees at the Gates Foundation saying oh, alright, it's OK for me to fail."

Raikes has known and worked closely with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for 28 years. Raikes joined Microsoft when the company had about 100 employees and met his wife, Tricia, there.

He said working with Melinda Gates has been a highlight of the year.

"I knew Melinda at Microsoft, but in particular for me the most new fun in this year has been working with Melinda," he said. "For me she's a tremendous collaborator, a great coach, a great mentor." She has a deeper understanding of how the foundation works than her husband, who was busy at Microsoft until last year, he added.

Raikes said former Microsoft President Jon Shirley and baseball manager Lou Piniella are among his own mentors. He said he looked up to Shirley because he could not only guide others but "personally step in, roll up [his] sleeves and make it happen."

On Sept. 25 Raikes will address the annual meeting of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, focusing on the impact of the economic downturn on efforts to address family homelessness. Details are here.

Seattle-based non-profit PATH has been chosen to receive the 2009 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the largest humanitarian award in the world.

Hilton Foundation leaders are in town to talk about the award with PATH during a morning press conference tomorrow that includes speakers from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Seattle Rotary.

The $1.5 million prize "acknowledges one outstanding nonprofit, charitable, or non-governmental organization that has made significant contributions toward alleviating human suffering anywhere in the world," according to the Hilton Foundation's Web site.

It's also one of the largest monetary prizes -- about equal to the Nobel Prize. Previous winners have included BRAC, a Bangladeshi group that focuses on helping poor rural women using microfinance, Women for Women International, which helps survivors of war, and Partners in Health, which pioneered a comprehensive, community-based approach to improving health.

COURTESY OF PATH

A kiosk where women in a Nairobi slum sell water purified using a process developed by PATH.

PATH has been developing innovative health solutions for the past three decades, from vial monitors that indicate when vaccine is spoiled, to water purification programs, to an initiative to produce the world's first malaria vaccine. Its work has helped make Seattle a global health powerhouse.

Most recently, PATH scientists and collaborators developed methods that protect hepatitis B vaccine from heat and freeze damage, particularly important in parts of the world without proper refrigeration.

The Hilton Foundation, established by the founder of the Hilton Hotels chain, has awarded more than $800 million in grants and reported assets of $3.4 billion. More than half of the grants go to supporting international projects.

The foundation's international prize jury includes Catherine Bertini, senior fellow in agricultural development at the Gates Foundation, who is former director of the United Nations World Food Programme.

Steven M. Hilton, president and chief executive of the Hilton Foundation and the grandson of Conrad N. Hilton, will be speaking at PATH.

I'll report on more details from the press conference tomorrow.

Joe Cerrell, an early Gates Foundation employee who has shaped its communications and policy strategy on global health, will be moving to London to head the foundation's European office.

He'll lead an effort to expand the office in Europe, the foundation said today. Cerrell will oversee policy, advocacy and communications and assume the role in London on Jan. 1. He is currently director of global health policy and advocacy in Seattle.

"Joe has been a senior leader at the foundation for many years and has played a central role in its development and growth," foundation co-chair Bill Gates said in a statement. "He has also led highly successful global health advocacy activities, many of which were conducted with European partners."

He'll be charged with expanding the foundation's partnerships with European non-profits, governments and other groups, as well as managing grants. The foundation currently has major partnerships with development agencies of the United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Cerrell has worked at the Gates Foundation since 2001. Before that he was assistant press secretary to former Vice President Al Gore. He is the son of longtime Democratic political consultant Joe Cerrell, of Cerrell & Associates.

This post was written with Hal Bernton

Northwest non-profits have been making an impact around the globe, and now they're also helping to reshape the urban landscape back home.

At a time when many capital campaigns have come to a halt, two state-of-the art buildings are under construction to house the headquarters of growing non-profits.

CAITLIN CARLSON / MERCY CORPS

Mercy Corps new headquarters in downtown Portland.

Mercy Corps' $37 million headquarters building in downtown Portland isn't scheduled to open for business until Oct. 9, but reporters were given a sneak peak today.

The building, which will replace six leased offices that house 150 Portland-based staff, includes solar panels, a green roof, natural ventilation and other energy-saving features that have earned it a LEED Platinum rating - the highest of a four-tiered certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.

The 80,000 square-foot headquarters will include a first-floor "Action Center" to educate people about global development issues and a space for Mercy Corp's Northwest staff, which is involved in aiding small entrepreneurs in the region. The building in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood will give the aid organization a much higher-profile in its hometown.

"A lot of people tell us that Mercy Corps is one of the best kept secrets in Portland, and we really haven't had a way to welcome people," said Paul Dudley Hart, a Mercy Corps senior vice president. "This is what the ground floor is about."

Mercy Corps, which also has an office in Seattle, operates in more than 35 countries with a budget of more than $300 million. The new headquarters has been financed by a mix of tax credits, grants, a $7 million loan and a $10 million capital campaign that is about $1.4 million shy of its reaching its goal, according to Mercy Corp officials.

The headquarters project involved renovating and adding on to a historic Skidmore Fountain Building that first opened to business in 1892 as a center for wholesale grocery distribution. The expanded structure includes four floors of office and working space and a partial basement.

The Action Center, which will be the center of public involvement, will feature four "training towers" where students and other visitors will be challenged to help tackle development issues. When the center opens in October, the training towers will include a look at war-torn Afghanistan, climate change in Niger and land reform issues in Guatemala.

Dudley Hart said that the building's costs were dramatically lowered by the grants and tax credits, and that the end result will be a big savings compared to trying to rent space in downtown Portland. The LEED Platinum rating also will yield energy cost savings in the decades ahead, and is expected to deliver a major reduction of the building's carbon foot print.

As part of the effort to green the headquarters building, there are no special set asides for employee parking, and most of the Mercy Corps staff are expected to walk, bike or take mass transit to work.

In Seattle, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's $500 million new headquarters is more than halfway finished. The foundation was originally scheduled to move into its campus in the winter 2010, but the current home page lists a move-in date of spring 2011. The 600,000-square-foot facility, with two 6-story office buildings designed by NBBJ, covers an entire city block. You can watch the progress on this Web cam, thanks to this report.

People from the Gates Foundation recently visited Mercy Corps in Portland to take a look at the center and compare notes as they develop plans for a similar public outreach. Both of the headquarters will change the way the groups relate to their communities by giving visitors a hands-on way to explore their work.

This post was written by Linda Shaw

Two early-learning efforts -- one in the Seattle area and one in Yakima -- received another $8 million in funding from Thrive by Five Washington and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The White Center Early Learning Initiative and East Yakima's Ready by Five each will receive $4 million over the next year. Those donations follow first-round grants last year of $11.7 million to the White Center initiative, and $5 million to East Yakima.

Both initiatives are working to substantially increase high-quality learning opportunities for children from birth to age 5.

In the past year, the White Center Early Learning Initiative broke ground on an early learning center that will open this winter. It also started the Outreach Doula program, a home-visiting program that supports Somali and Latino families with health, child development, and early learning information.

The Yakima program worked with the Yakima School District to bring kindergartners to school two weeks early to help them get acquainted with their teachers, classmates, routines and expectations. It also started a monthly program to help parents learn more about how to help their children learn.

Mercy Karanja knows first hand what happens when money for agriculture goes away.

She was working in the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture on extension programs for farmers. The system had been funded mostly from outside donors such as the World Bank.

In the early 1990s, the country started a period of structural adjustment under guidance from the World Bank and IMF. That resulted in a complete reorganization of government budgets. One of the first things to go was support for agricultural extension services.

COURTESY OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION

Mercy Karanja, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For Karanja the change hit suddenly.

"The World Bank just cut the umbilical cord," she said. "It was so harsh."

She recalled receiving a notice that the following week there would no more visits to farmers to take care of cows.

"I had cows myself," she said. "It was like this is incredible. Artificial insemination requires refrigeration. Tell me who is going to invest in that?"

The cost of inseminating one cow jumped from 20 cents to $30, she said.

In 1998 Karanja left her government job and joined the Kenya National Farmers Union. She wanted to mobilize farmers to give them a stronger voice in decision making.

Farmers suddenly had to shift focus from relying on the government to fending for themselves, she said. Yet there was not enough of a private sector to support their needs.

"It was extremely painful and it has never come back," she said. "Farmers are still struggling. In my own experience this is what has caused them to really regress."

In the new scheme, the World Bank funding for agriculture was subsumed under rural development, which meant roads and other priorities, she said. As a result, money for farming went from a significant part of the budget to almost nothing.

The World Bank has since acknowledged that agricultural development is a key to reducing poverty in Africa and has increased its commitment.

Karanja was later tapped for a job in France at the International Federation of Agricultural Producers. She joined the Gates Foundation in early 2008, working under Roy Steiner on farm productivity.

The program targets small farmers living on less than $1 a day.

"We have to be more creative in reaching these small farmers," she said. One project that looks promising uses radio programs to get information out to farmers, such as how to keep plants free of disease.

As for the role of genetically engineered seeds, Karanja says she witnessed a huge debate in Kenya in the early part of the decade. Kenya has a problem with drought, diseases and productivity, she said.

"We asked transgenic proponents what does it offer us?"

The Gates Foundation has funded reseach into drought tolerant maize and fortified cassava. Such specific products might be helpful, she said, but they're not an option now.

Farmers in Kenya are "not ideologically inclined toward one thing or the other," she said. "They're saying give us solutions. Give me whatever medicine can make me better."

Karanja said the Gates program has made progress helping farmers, including getting more varieties of seeds distributed to agro-dealers and reaching some areas with irrigation, but it's too early to see an increase in productivity.

Drought and civil strife have taken a harsh toll in Kenya, which is experiencing hunger in regions where there was no such hunger before. People will have to take a long view of change, she said.

"Please let's keep the momentum for a little longer to create the mechanisms for the system to stand on its own."

Africa is getting more attention with a new U.S. administration that says it's committed to helping African countries achieve self sufficiency and food security. The Gates Foundation has also brought a renewed focus on African agriculture through its own programs and grantees, including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

What is the best way to move forward from decades of neglect and a recent food crisis that pushed 100 million more people into poverty?

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tours Africa this week, a coalition of grassroots groups says "business as usual" won't work, and criticized the U.S. for pursuing a narrow approach that puts too much emphasis on biotechnology.

SIMON MAINA/AFP/Getty Images

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets Masaai traditional dancers in Kenya after addressing the 8th Forum of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

The US Working Group on the Food Crisis used a visit by Clinton and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to raise the question of whether U.S. tax dollars for food-related aid to Africa are being spent wisely.

The United States and other top industrialized nations pledged $20 billion to promote sustainable agricultural development in the world's poorest regions last month at the G8 Summit in Italy.

The USAID's policies toward agriculture in Kenya, stated here, include a public-private partnership with KARI and Monsanto to develop genetically engineered sweet potatoes resistant to virus, and promote public awareness about the technology in Kenya.

(The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center said it was never involved in the original project. I had listed the Danforth Center among the partners, based on information from the USAID Kenya Web site. Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth center, said the center brought material from Monsanto and KARI to its labs and is working on the project using a different technology, in partnership with the government of Uganda).

After 14 years and $6 million, the project proved to be a failure, the coalition said, adding that local varieties outperformed genetically modified varieties in field trials.

The coalition called such policies "misguided" and at odds with a report on the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The report, which came out earlier this year, took four years and was commissioned by the World Bank and United Nations to evaluate the impacts of agricultural methods on hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, health and sustainable development.

The report was approved by more than 50 governments, but not the United States, Canada or Australia.

The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social clashes and environmental disaster, said the co-chair of the report, Hans Herren, who is president of the Millennium Institute.

"I fear within the new (U.S.) administration not enough time has been devoted to reading and digesting the report so it can be used for its full potential to address problems at the root," he said.

Herren, who received the World Food Prize in 1995 for developing a pest control program that rescued the African the cassava, said building more resilience in plants through classical breeding is a better answer than engineering for drought resistance. Climate change may produce drought but also may produce severe storms and unpredictable weather patterns. He said the Kenyan agricultural institute is on the right track in broadening its approach more recently.

The report's findings reject current industrial farming methods as a solution to sustainable food production, concluding that the benefits of modern agriculture have not been equitably shared and have come at too high a price to the poor and to the environment.

Josphat Ngonyo, head of the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, a network of 60 community groups, said that small holder farmers in Africa have been left out of the process of determining agricultural policy.

"We find that most of African governments ignore local farmers. They are not consulted," Ngonyo said. "We see heavy manipulation by multinational companies who have their ways to influence policies and legislation."

"What (farmers) clearly need is not biotechnology," he said. "They need water, markets for farm products. They need good roads to access markets, and they need incentives that would enhance getting their products to the markets."

The Kenya Biodiversity Coalition said the visit to KARI showcases "the Obama Administration's betrayal to Africa's small scale farmers and misplaced priorities on how to achieve sustainable food security in Africa."

"Chemical-intensive production methods continue to have adverse health and environmental effects," the group said, "while 'modern biotechnology' (genetically engineered seed) has contributed to hardly any verifiable positive impacts on equitable and sustainable development."

Asked to assess the work of Gates-funded AGRA, Herren praised its emphasis on soil quality and a program to train traditional plant breeders.

"What I think is a problem is they feel they know it all," he said. "To go out here and try to replicate the green revolution is not good enough."

He said where the effort falls short is in understanding "how the whole system operates." Key road blocks include lack of market access, infrastructure and training for farmers, he said.

"There are major gaps there in the AGRA program which are not addressed to have the impact they think they're going to have."

AGRA's main programs are seeds, soil health, market access, and policy and partnerships. The alliance has said it seeks to avoid the adverse effects of the original Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America, including overuse of fertilizer, and focus on small farmers living on less than a dollar a day--most of whom are women.

Last month AGRA, chaired by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, launched a program with KARI and other partners to improve maize yields by counteracting soil acidity.

The Gates Foundation's own assessment of the program last year can be found here.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's endowment grew $2.7 billion in the last quarter, according to new figures posted on the foundation's Web site today.

The world's largest private foundation had $30.2 billion in its asset trust endowment as of June 30, up from $27.5 billion. It also added 21 new employees for a total of 781.

The fourth and most recent installment of Warren Buffett's gift, $1.25 billion, was recorded on July 1. The gift comes in the form of Berkshire Hathaway B shares. This year, the value of those shares was about 30 percent less than last year's, owing to the decline in stock prices during the recession. Buffett has given the foundation a total of $6.41 billion so far.

The Gates Foundation's endowment, including Buffett's annual installments, is held in an asset trust, which funds the foundation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust is managed by a team of outside investment managers. In addition to selling Berkshire Hathaway shares, they have been buying shares in U.K. sportswear retailer JJB Sports. Here is a look at Michael Larson, the man who runs it.

Give up millions of dollars a year by declining a commercial logo on the chests of its celebrated players? It sounded like a bad idea to FC Barcelona's marketing department. Manchester United, which wore the AIG logo on its uniforms until January, made about $25 million a year from the deal.

But the decision to wear the Unicef logo instead, and pay Unicef almost $2 million a year for the privilege, was made by President Joan Laporta, and three years later, it has paid off well, says Marta Segu, executive director of the FC Barcelona Foundation.

"Now the marketing people have said this is one of the most important decisions we have taken," she said. The result is a unique global identity.

The team is promoting the fight against malaria on its jerseys (pictured at right) during its current U.S. tour. Tomorrow FC Barcelona visits Seattle to play against the Seattle Sounders FC.

"Before we had the same value as other clubs like Real Madrid or Chelsea. We have been winners, we make money," Segu said. "Now everybody knows that Barça has another value -- solidarity, social responsibility."

The club gives Unicef 1.5 million euros a year, and 0.7 percent of its revenue goes toward humanitarian causes. The budget of the club's charitable foundation, which was created in 1994 but basically languished for a decade without any real plan, tripled over the last six years to $6 million.

"In 2005 we started making new programs and projects," Segu said. "We decided not only will it be an increase of the brand, the brand will increase all over the world toward our humanitarian dimension."

FC Barcelona's humanitarian work includes a new partnership with United Against Malaria, a coalition supported by the Gates Foundation that I wrote about today (thanks to everyone for the Tweets!) That partnership includes Seattle-based global health non-profit PATH. For Seattle's global health community, so much is riding on success fighting malaria, from SBRI's research toward a vaccine to the Gates Foundation's grand ambitions to wipe out a disease that kills a million people a year.

In Los Angeles, the campaign picked up the support of Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber and the Galaxy's Landon Donovan, the best scoring American player (pictured with ball above).

FC Barcelona player Seydou Keita returned to his native Mali earlier this year to distribute bed nets to families there.

"To be able to travel back to Mali and to talk to my people about the importance of fighting malaria was a wonderful experience," he said.

"We're very lucky to have such dedicated fans--and one of the ways that we can thank them for that dedication is to help raise awareness. Since so much of the world pays attention to soccer, we have the opportunity to focus that attention on malaria as well."

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

After surviving two bouts of malaria, Sanna Nyassi helped raise funds and awareness about disease for Nothing But Nets.

FC Barcelona became the first team to support the UN Millennium Development Goals and now has three partnerships with the UN -- with Unicef to help vulnerable children, including those affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa, with UNESCO to fight racism in sports, and with the UNHCR to provide sports and health programs in refugee camps.

Throughout Africa and in Mexico and India, the foundation set up centers for children that offer hot meals, help with homework, health care and sports and promote gender equality.

For Seattle Sounders FC player Sanna Nyassi, his most recent case of malaria back home in his native Gambia was so serious that he and his mother both worried he might not survive. But he got treated and pulled through, and ended up playing professional soccer for the Sounders the next year. Nyassi said he was a fan of FC Barcelona before, but after hearing about the club's work to help fight the disease, "I liked them more," he said.

Technology holds the key to solving problems of health, education and poverty, Bill Gates made a point of saying in his recent visit to India.

The wholehearted embrace of technology comes as no surprise from the chairman of the world's largest software company. But in the context of philanthropy, perhaps he should have added the words "when appropriate."

MANISH SWARUP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Indian President Pratibha Patil, left, hands the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development to Bill Gates as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, second left, applauds.

Gates touted the benefits of computers to help rural people access video lectures in villages without schools, and mobile devices to help doctors examine patients remotely. Slum dwellers in Bangalore can use mobile phones with SMS messaging and GPS to find jobs as day laborers through a Gates Foundation-supported program called LabourNet. Technology can reduce government corruption if citizens can use mobile phones and public computer terminals to give feedback on public services, he said.

"I am a 24-hour technology person," Gates said.

He visited India to assess the foundation's programs and receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development on behalf of the foundation. His appearances seemed to be a mix of the foundation's work and Microsoft's mission. Gates said Microsoft would like to partner with the Indian government in a project to provide each of India's 1.17 billion citizens with a unique identity number and biometric card.

The visit came after recent suggestions that the Gates Foundation's Avahan program has not lived up to its goals of curtailing the spread of HIV/AIDS. The $258 million initiative has been led by highly paid business consultants rather than people with public health experience. After the Indian government balked at taking on what has become one of India's largest health programs, the Gates Foundation increased its funding by $80 million.

In health and development, high-tech solutions don't always work. They can even make things worse if applied in the wrong way, by diverting resources from more fundamental programs or missing the root cause of a problem, for example.

Sometimes the most appropriate technology is none at all. Ironically this point was made best by one of the Gates Foundation's biggest grantees: PATH.

Its name stands for Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, and the idea behind that was reflected in a speech by Margarita Quintanilla earlier this year in Seattle.

Quintanilla, PATH's country leader in Nicaragua, got her start working at the ground level as a community health coordinator teaching basic concepts as washing hands to avoid diseases and getting regular pap screenings. She realized that technology could not overcome one of the biggest obstacles to health: gender-based violence and its effects, contributing to the spread of diseases like HIV/AIDS, unwanted pregnancy and other problems, all of which are common in India. Her approach was to build projects to teach life skills and health education to pre-adolescent girls and promote respect for women in families.

The more PATH's work grew, the more Quintanilla realized it would have to include "both technical and social approaches to increase the country's capacity to ensure better health," she said.

"We have to be wise and intelligent in our solutions. We have the responsibility of promoting change in the right way."

About 800 people listened to Quintanilla, but billions listen to Gates. As one of the world's most respected voices, he has a unique opportunity to call attention to social issues that no technology alone can solve.
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UPDATE: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn analyze the links between gender discrimination and poverty, child mortality, global health issues and other problems in this excellent magazine series.

Bill Gates announced a new contribution of $80 million today to Avahan, an initiative the Gates Foundation launched in 2003 for HIV prevention programs in India.

Gates is visiting India this week to receive an award for the foundation's philanthropic work and to take stock of the Avahan program. Before today the foundation had already committed $258 million to the program, which involves more than 100 non-profits in six Indian states.

Gates will meet Friday with Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Union Secretary for Health and Family Welfare, to discuss "plans to gradually transition key aspects of Avahan to the government of India and other partners," the foundation said this morning in a statement.

Gates is contributing more funding for the transition after the government questioned the sustainability of maintaining the project on its own.

Avahan, which means "call to action" in Sanskrit, was the subject of a critical report in Forbes magazine last month, which concluded the $258 million project "got lost between B-school and brothel."

The article picked up on a theme that may run through many of Gates programs for better or worse: the tendency to apply business and technology solutions to global health and development problems.

The foundation's most ambitious initiative in India has largely failed to deliver on its goals because it substituted business expertise for practical health experience and spent too much money on things like salaries, travel and marketing, the report contends.

The program is run by Ashok Alexander, an executive recruited from consulting firm McKinsey. He has been among the foundation's highest paid employees, with a salary of about $425,000.

Alexander discussed the program's work in an interview with Conde Nast in December. He was asked how his business background has helped him run an AIDS program.

"This was a marketing challenge," he said. "Our "consumers" were hidden, and the question was how to aggregate them. The women wanted to get into a violence-reduction program, not a condom program. Most HIV programs are supply-side driven: You count treatments and how many condoms are distributed. In this case, the consumer wasn't interested in the product. We had to persuade the consumer it was in her interest to be strong and healthy."

Tachi Yamada, president of the foundation's global health program, wrote a letter in response to the Forbes article.

"There's no evidence for the claim that Avahan has failed to "make a serious difference in India's fight against AIDS," Yamada wrote. "Avahan support has made it possible to provide prevention services to hundreds of thousands of high-risk individuals every month. While it is too early to fully assess Avahan's long-term impact, early signs are encouraging--data from some projects suggest these efforts are increasing condom use and reducing STD infections."

Meanwhile Avahan has begun handing over the reins to the government-run National AIDS Control Organisation. The government body had warned that large parts of the program are unsustainable, according to an Indian official quoted in Forbes.

During the transition, "Avahan will provide financial and technical support to ensure that prevention programs can be sustained over time," the foundation said today. Avahan has awarded more than $100 million in grants for the transition.

Gates is in New Delhi this week to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament, and Development on behalf of his foundation. The Gates Foundation is being recognized for "pioneering and exemplary philanthropic work around the world and in India in health."

He congratulated the Indian government for its leadership on HIV prevention, saying it could be a model for the rest of the world.

The country is facing a new and painful economic crisis, but "we've been in an education crisis for decades," Bill Gates told a conference of lawmakers today.

Educational performance at every level, from primary school to college, is dropping against the rest of the world, he said. The United States has fallen from No.1 to No.10 among industrialized nations in college graduation rates.

And U.S. high school graduation rates have not improved for 40 years, said Gates, who is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. More than 30 percent of all students drop out, including almost half of minority high school students.

MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, is calling on lawmakers to reform education and raise graduation rates.

"Success in this century will depend on how well America does what we have so far done very badly -- give low-income and minority students a world-class education," Gates said in a speech at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Philadelphia.

Difficult times can often spark needed reforms, he added.

He called on lawmakers to use $100 billion in federal stimulus money to change the way schools are run, creating new ways to measure and reward graduation rates instead of enrollment rates, for example, and tracking which colleges prepare students best for the job market.

"Colleges are not entitled to escape scrutiny at a time of a plunging educational performance and permanent fiscal pressure," Gates said.

He also advocated linking financial incentives such as state funding, financial aid and other programs to school performance.

Adding financial incentives for graduation can encourage colleges to offer schedules that make more sense for students who have to work, courses and counseling that guide students toward specific job goals and more innovative use of technology, such as online lectures, Gates said.

Teachers play the most important role in student achievement, so effective teachers should be identified and rewarded.

"We reward teachers for things that do not identify effective teaching -- like seniority and master's degrees," Gates said.

He criticized a law passed last year in New York that bars student test scores from being considered in teacher tenure decisions.

"That was a strategic win for people who oppose reform -- because no real reform will happen until we can evaluate teachers based on their students' achievement."

Gates encouraged lawmakers to support the state-led Common Core State Standards Initiative as a way to create higher standards for students across the country.

Linking common standards to curriculum can unleash creativity in new teaching materials, such as online tools and videos of every required course, he said. Gates said he and his wife have used online videos to help their own children with school work.

"Imagine having the people who create electrifying video games applying their intelligence to online tools that pull kids in and make algebra fun," he said.

The Gates Foundation has focused its U.S. grantmaking program on education, but its initial push for small schools produced mixed results and led to revamping of its strategy.

The foundation recently announced a new post-secondary initiative with a goal of doubling the number of low-income students in the United States who graduate from college or other post high-school programs by 2025. The foundation is funding pilot programs at community colleges and technical schools to help low-income adults with full-time jobs get through college.

Of the $20 billion the Gates Foundation has given away over the past 15 years, about $5.2 billion has gone into U.S. programs, mostly for education.

Rajiv Shah is bringing two familiar faces to D.C. -- a former colleague at the Gates Foundation and Sen. Maria Cantwell's chief of staff, both of whom have just joined him at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Rachael Goldfarb was named counselor to the under secretary last week by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. She will work under Shah, who heads Research, Education and Economics at the USDA and is also chief scientist.

At the Gates Foundation, Goldfarb was special assistant to Tachi Yamada, president of the foundation's global health program. Shah was the founding director of the Gates Foundation's agriculture program. Kudos to Clay Holtzman for following the trail of foundation execs to the Obama Administration.

Goldfarb, a Philadelphia native, was assistant to John Podesta, President Clinton's chief of staff. Before that she was assistant to the policy staff at the National Economic Council. She also worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Another Washington state Democrat now part of Shah's team at the USDA is Maura O'Neill, formerly Sen. Cantwell's chief of staff. She was named senior advisor for energy and climate, which is also part of Research, Education and Economics. O'Neill has an extensive resume, including starting technology companies, promoting investment in regional biotech, serving on Seattle City Light's Energy Advisory board, and lecturing at UC Berkeley and Columbia University. She earned a bachelor's degree and PhD from the University of Washington.

President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation for a new three-year agricultural initiative announced today.

Leaders from the Group of Eight leading economies made the $20 billion pledge to finance agricultural projects in poor countries to fight hunger and reduce food price volatility.

The U.S.-sponsored food security initiative aims to provide poor farmers in developing countries with seeds, fertilizers, infrastructure and other tools to help them boost local food production, a shift from previous policy that emphasized sending food aid from abroad.

Here is what Obama said about the issue today:
"There is no reason why Africa cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food. It has sufficient arable land. What's lacking is the right seeds, the right irrigation, but also the kinds of institutional mechanisms that ensure that a farmer is going to be able to grow crops, get them to market, get a fair price."

The Gates Foundation has focused on seeds, fertilizer, irrigation and market access in its own programs, spending $2.6 billion on global development so far, most of it for agriculture in Africa.

The world's largest foundation has taken on a major role in agricultural development since it launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006. AGRA funds work to improve seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, and market access for small farmers, employing techniques of the original Green Revolution started in the 1940s in an effort to boost food production in Africa.

The new grants by Gates and Rockefeller came at a time when U.S. funding for agriculture had fallen sharply. Agriculture's share of U.S. development assistance was 3 percent in 2005, compared to 12 percent in 1985, according to this report. In dollars, support for agriculture went from a high of about $8 billion in 1984 to $3.4 billion in 2004.

Now besides the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, the U.K'.s Department for International Development has become another core donor to AGRA.

Obama also talked about agriculture and his trip to Ghana in this interview with AllAfrica.com.

"I'm still frustrated over the fact that the green revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009," he said.

The push for a green revolution in Africa has sparked criticism and debate about the role of high-tech solutions over ecological farming methods. Obama said today that low-tech solutions are also important.

"We don't need fancy computers to solve those problems; we need tried and true agricultural methods and technologies that are cheap and are efficient but could have a huge impact in terms of people's day-to-day well-being."

The Gates Foundation has also funded policy studies and advocacy campaigns. It gave nearly $1 million to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to fund a project on the U.S. role in global agricultural development, and Gates Foundation Senior Fellow Catherine Bertini co-authored the report.

At the beginning of the Obama Administration, the Chicago Council released the report with recommendations for a new policy on agriculture as a way to restore the United States "as a force for positive change in the world."

The report, "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Hunger and Poverty: The Chicago Initiative on Global Agricultural Development," made five recommendations and more than 20 specific suggestions, calling for a renewed U.S. commitment to alleviating global poverty through agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The recommendations include increasing support for agricultural education, research, including genetic engineering, and infrastructure.

The official support for biotech and commodity crops was called into question today in this piece by food writer Paula Crossfield.

Bill Gates has used forums such as the World Economic Forum in Davos to increase public attention to the issue, and has spent more time talking directly with world leaders since leaving Microsoft to dedicate himself to full-time philanthropy.

Gates has taken up the cause of agriculture in meetings with key leaders such U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, chairman of AGRA, recently outlined a 10-year strategy to develop regional breadbaskets among African countries to produce staples. AGRA President Namanga Ngongi was in Brussels a couple of weeks ago meeting with European Union officials about the topic.

The food crisis itself may pushed the issue back onto the political agenda. The UN predicts the number of people going hungry will rise to 1.02 billion this year, reversing a four-decade trend of declines.

Yet today's G8 commitment also shows that the foundation's relatively new efforts in global development are beginning to have a catalyzing effect on agricultural policy, just as its health programs have helped shape the world health agenda.

Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy for the Gates Foundation's global development program, said today's pledge is encouraging. Leadership coming from the G8 on agriculture could be a platform for the future in the same way that a G8 agreement to support public health in 2000 helped create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, he said.

"It's focused on the right set of issues."

Investor Warren Buffett made his annual gift of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Wednesday. At $1.25 billion, the value of the gift is 30 percent less than last year's contribution of $1.8 billion.

Buffett donated 428,688 shares of Class B Common Stock to the Gates Foundation in 2009 as part of his lifetime pledge, described here.

Under Buffett's plan to transfer the majority of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, the timing of the annual gift and the amount of shares are predetermined. But the value fluctuates.

According to the schedule, the number of shares donated diminishes by 5 percent each year. Buffett had expected the value of his shares to increase by an amount that more than compensates for their smaller number. And for the first two years, they did. CNBC's coverage has a chart of the annual gifts here.

But even shrewd investors have not escaped the wrath of the global recession, and Berkshire Hathaway has seen the price of its Class B shares decline by about 26 percent over the past year. Those shares closed at $2,924 a share on Wednesday.

Forbes estimated Buffett's net worth at $37 billion this year, ranking him second only to Bill Gates (whose worth was estimated at $40 billion) in the list of the richest people in the world.

This post was written by Sandi Doughton:

In the final hour of a Seattle conference on tuberculosis today, an African activist chided a room full of top health officials, scientists and other experts for their lack of action.

"The gap between rhetoric and reality grows bigger and bigger," said Paula Akugizibwe, regional treatment advocacy coordinator for the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa.

Akugizibwe said she won't attend anymore conferences like the Pacific Health Summit, where the same people say the same things, then jet off to yet another conference for more of the same.

"We are sitting in fancy hotels, and people are dying," she said. "We've been talking about this for way too long. It's a travesty."

Many of the world's most powerful public health officials attended the conference, including World Health Organization Director General Margaret Chan, UNICEF chief Ann Veneman, and top officials from the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the sponsors.

The topic of the final session was how to boost media coverage of tuberculosis and create a sense of urgency about a disease that kills 2 million people a year, mostly in the developing world.

Press coverage of the conference itself was restricted, though. Journalists were allowed to attend, but not to quote participants by name or affiliation without their express permission.

Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Global Relations and one of the most outspoken flamethrowers in attendance, told the group she couldn't understand why they couldn't create a sense of urgency, when the situation is so dire that officials should be "running around with their hair on fire."

For example, when nearly half a million new cases of multi-drug-resistant TB occur around the world each year, Kenya recently announced it can only afford to provide the costly treatment to 40 patients, Garrett said.

Dr. Krista Dong, who works with TB and AIDS patients in South Africa, said the conference was too focused on technology, like new drugs and vaccines and quicker ways to diagnose tuberculosis. Even if those things were available today, clinics and hospitals in Africa couldn't use them, she said. Most medical workers don't even have basic tools, like the special face masks needed to protect them from TB and prevent its spread. There's no room to isolate TB patients. Instead, they're all crowded into the same room, but then they share bathrooms with other patients.

"If you could lift (one of these hospitals) up and drop it here in Seattle, it would immediately be wrapped, quarantined and burned," Dong said.

Garrett pointed out that the little-known H8, or Health 8, made up of the world's top global health officials, meets Friday in Seattle. She called on the forum, which rarely reveals its agenda or conclusions, to take some concrete steps to help people with tuberculosis.

Global health funding has quadrupled in less than two decades to almost $22 billion, boosted by U.S. public funding, corporate donations and giving from private foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But imbalances remain in directing the money to best combat a range of diseases around the world, according to researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Well-heeled donors like Gates, corporations and ordinary people donating to their favorite charities are changing the landscape of global health funding, the UW researchers and colleagues from Harvard University reported in a study published today in the medical journal The Lancet. The study represents the first comprehensive picture of funding for global health projects, the authors said.

Besides pouring in more money, the Gates Foundation has changed the balance of power in global health, said Christopher Murray, director of the UW institute and one of the authors. The institute was founded with a $105 million donation from the Gates Foundation to do the type of rigorous analyses of health spending and programs that no one else was doing.

ERIKA SCHULTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at UW, in his office.

"I think their influence on the field and as a catalyst for other groups to engage has been very strong," Murray said. "The net effect is to bring more groups, more focus on global health and more viewpoints at the table."

The study tracked assistance to low and middle-income countries from 1990 to 2007. The money isn't always getting where it's needed most. "Twelve of the 30 countries with the highest disease burden aren't receiving as much aid as healthier, and, in some cases, wealthier countries," the study found.

For example, Nicaragua and Turkmenistan have roughly the same burden of disease, but Nicaragua receives 33 times as much health funding as the former Soviet republic. Ethiopia, which ranks second in health assistance funding after India, ranks 9th in terms of the level of disease and disability.

The Gates Foundation provides the largest source of private funding, increasing its global health commitments substantially since 2004, to nearly $2 billion in both 2006 and 2007. Private sources of global health funding grew from 19 percent of the total in 1998 to nearly 27 percent in 2007, corresponding to the Gates Foundation's emergence in the field.

Newer Gates-supported organizations such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) now have a central role in mobilizing and channeling global health funds, while funding through institutions such as United Nations and development banks declined, according to the study.

Though international organizations like the World Health Organization and UNICEF have long been criticized for rigid bureaucracies that stifled innovation, their declining role may harm efforts to improve health around the world, the researchers say.

When those organizations are forced to compete for funding, they lose their status as "trusted neutral brokers between the scientific and technical communities on the one hand, and governments of developing countries on the other hand."

Of U.S.-based non-governmental organizations, the Federal Way-based Christian relief group World Vision was the fourth leading provider of overseas health funds, spending $826 million from 2002 to 2006. PATH, the Seattle based non-profit focused on health technology and solutions for the developing world, also made the list as the 15th largest global health funder with $389 million in expenditures.

In recent years, by far the biggest share of money has gone to AIDS/HIV programs. In 2007, $5.1 billion of assistance funding was devoted to AID/HIV. Slightly less than $1 billion was spent on bolstering health systems in developing nations. Malaria programs received $800 million, while efforts to combat tuberculosis received $700 million in 2007.

Murray said it was challenging putting the numbers together because of the difficulty tracing U.S. government funds.

"It's easy to get the budgeted amounts but to get the amount actually spent, the U.S. is not very good about reporting that," he said. "The U.S. needs to be more forthcoming on the details of where their funds go, and relating expenditures to what's achieved."

Data from U.S. based non-profits was easier to find because they are required to report it on their tax returns, he said.

A Lancet commentary on the analysis faulted it for failing to include money spent on water and sanitation programs. "The provision of clean water and sanitation would probably do as much to facilitate good health as dose the assistance provided to direct medical care," wrote Peter S. Heller of Johns Hopkins University.

This post was written by Sandi Doughton.

Four major health gatherings will be held in Seattle next week, all somewhat under the radar and closed to the public.

One little-known group, the H8 (Health 8), consists of the leaders of seven acronym-prone global bodies such as WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank and UNAIDS -- and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the only private philanthropy with a seat at the table.

The H8 rolls into Seattle the same week as the Pacific Health Summit, the Global Health Research Congress, and a meeting of a group called HIROS, made up of the leaders of government agencies and foundations that fund health research.

So who are all these elite decision makers and what are they planning to do?

WHO Director General Margaret Chan will be here. Also attending one or more of the meetings will be Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; UNCEF chief Ann Veneman; and seven-time Photographer of the Year James Nachtwey.

The Pacific Health Summit, in its fifth year, brings together global health leaders and private industry, particularly pharma. This year's topic is control of drug-resistant tuberculosis. The research summit, which is in its first year, aims to piggyback on the influx of experts and help complement the higher-level discussions with the nitty-gritty science needed to inform global policies. Many of the world's top TB researchers will attend.

Both the summit and research congress are invitation-only, and some local NGOs were angry to realize they couldn't even attend a session featuring Paul Farmer. (Farmer will give a public presentation during his Seattle visit -- see details)

Journalists can attend both events -- but are forbidden to quote anyone by name or affiliation. The reason given is that participants will able to speak more freely and candidly if they know their comments won't wind up in the newspaper or on Internet.

As for any public or press access to either the H8 or HIROS?

Forget about it.

Little has been published about the H8 and its proceedings. Its meetings are described as "informal" and a few Web entries say its goal is to help the organizations work together to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's endowment has dropped $2 billion since January. The foundation's asset trust endowment fell to $27.5 billion from $29.5 billion at the end of 2008.

The new figure was reported quietly on a fact sheet on the foundation's Web site last month.

In the Gates Foundation 2008 annual report, released last week, it reported endowment assets of $29.5 billion. That figure reflected a 20 percent decrease in the endowment portfolio's value in 2008 as a result of the economic downturn.

It's a challenging time for all non-profits, even the world's largest private foundation.

"We're all digging deeper into our pockets and coming out with less money," Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes wrote in an open letter accompanying the report. "Our endowments are down, so even if we draw a higher percentage than we did last year, we don't have as much to give away."

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $20 million to the World Bank for a program to provide financial services in developing countries.

The World Bank said today it will use the Gates funding to establish what it calls the Agriculture Finance Support Facility.

The program's mission is "to increase access to financial services, such as savings, credit, payments and insurance, in rural areas in developing countries as profitable business lines," according to the World Bank. It will make grants to banks and other institutions.

The global economic crisis means access to financial services has become even more difficult for small farmers and rural entrepreneurs.

Where traditional financial cooperatives are not providing sufficient services, the World Bank seems to be looking at funding alternative programs.

In microfinance, the World Bank Group's biggest investor is the IFC, a profit-oriented financial institution with a mixed record.

The IFC had a microfinance portfolio of $498 million in 2007 and planned to double its investment to $1.2 billion by fiscal year 2010, which would make IFC the largest investor in the microfinance industry.

The World Bank said its data shows that 69 percent of small farmers in India did not have credit with formal financial institutions. In Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru nearly 40 percent of agricultural producers are "credit-constrained," and less than 1 percent of farmers in Zambia and less than 2 percent of the rural population in Nigeria have access to credit from formal institutions.

"There is a great need among smallholder farmers, who make up the bulk of the world's poor, for ways to save and manage their money," said Carlos Cuevas, deputy director of Financial Services for the Poor at the Gates Foundation. "Having access to safe and reliable financial services such as savings, credit and insurance, allows poor farmers to safeguard cash, which they often receive only once a year during harvest."

Lack of access to credit was one factor behind the sharp rise of farmer suicides in India over the last decade. But some argue that World Bank policies are also to blame.

Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, admits that the world's largest charitable foundation needs to improve its internal processes and the quality of its outside partnerships.

"Our staff also told us that it can be hard to get things done at the foundation," Raikes wrote in his first annual letter as CEO, a post the Microsoft veteran began nine months ago. "We need to clear some hurdles so we can all focus our energy on the people we aim to help."

The feedback came from a survey of employees (the first one the foundation has ever taken) earlier this year, Raikes wrote. His letter is part of the foundation's 2008 annual report, which was released today.

ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jeff Raikes discussed the transition from business to philanthropy in his first annual letter, showing some of the humility and frankness he was known for at Microsoft.

Raikes said his first priority is to "make sure our internal processes run smoothly," and his second is to "improve the quality of our external partnerships." (I guess you don't hone phrases like that without a couple of decades as a software executive. Was he talking about Office?)

"I know we are not doing as good a job as we can in this area," he wrote. "Starting with me, everybody at the foundation needs to make a concerted effort to listen more carefully to what our partners in the field have to tell us."

In a time of economic uncertainty, such changes can make each dollar spent have greater impact, said Raikes.

Looking at finances, the foundation paid $2.8 billion in grants and other charitable expenses last year and expects to pay out $3.5 billion in grants and related expenses in 2009.

It reported endowment assets of $29.5 billion, following a 20 percent drop in its portfolio value last year as a result of the economic downturn. In 2007 its assets stood at $38.7 billion.

Warren Buffett contributed $1.8 billion in shares of Berkshire Hathaway "B" stock to the trust that manages the endowment, while Bill Gates contributed about $183 million in investment management services.

But the world's top two billionaires weren't the only ones giving money.

"Several donors from the general public made contributions to the trust and foundation," according to a footnote in the report. Even though the foundation doesn't solicit donations, it received $10.4 million from individual, unnamed donors in 2008.

Raikes, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, has had a chance to get back to his roots in agriculture. He traveled to Kenya and Zambia earlier this year to visit projects, including a milk-chilling plant that Gates funded with Heifer International. Raikes said the investments in feed storage and refrigeration are helping African farmers produce more milk with their cattle and find new markets to sell it.

Global health accounted for 65 percent of the foundation's spending in 2008. Raikes said the foundation plans to spend "tens of millions" to help fund the final phase of clinical trials for a malaria vaccine, which started last month.

Yes, it's true. A dozen of the richest people in the world met for an unprecedented private gathering at the invitation of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to talk about giving away money.

The May 5 meeting at Rockefeller University included Gates, Buffett, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Eli Broad, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller Sr. and Ted Turner, among others. The meeting came to light only this week when it was reported by the Web site IrishCentral.

DAVE WEAVER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett led a private philanthropy discussion in a year of diminished portfolios even among top givers.

"It really was a group of friends and colleagues who share a commitment to philanthropy discussing ideas in a round table," said former Gates Foundation Chief Executive Patty Stonesifer, who attended the gathering.

In a phone interview today, Stonesifer sought to dispel notions and reports on the Web that the meeting was somehow veiled in secrecy.

"It wasn't secret," she said. "It was meant to be a gathering among friends and colleagues. It was something folks have been discussing for a long time. Bill and Warren hoped to do this occasionally. They sent out an invite and people came."

"This was about philanthropy and this group sharing their passions their interests," said Stonesifer, who is chairwoman of the Smithsonian Institution. "They each learned from each other about what could really make a difference."

But the Manhattan philanthropy salon raised interest for its uniqueness, and the fact that so many on the Forbes world's wealthiest list were able to meet almost completely under the radar. Other reports about the meeting came out here and here.

"As far as anything we've ever seen before, this group of philanthropists that are so high powered in the same room... I think it's unprecedented," said Chronicle of Philanthropy editor Stacy Palmer, who has been covering philanthropy for 20 years.

The members of the meeting have donated more than $72 billion to charity since 1996, according to The Chronicle.

"Given how serious these economic times are, I don't think it's surprising these philanthropists came together," Palmer said. "They don't typically get together and ask each other for advice."

There was no agenda, and the topics were as diverse as the group, Stonesifer said: "everything from U.S. education to efforts of the U.N. to emergency response in [Hurricane] Katrina and many international issues."

The three hosts [Gates, Buffett and David Rockefeller] "wanted to have a private gathering to discuss with others what motivated their giving, the areas of focus, lessons learned and thoughts on how they might increase giving going forward," Stonesifer said.

The elite group met from 3 p.m. through dinner in the President's House on the university campus. There were no 15-minute speeches, and very little of the conversation focused on the economy, Stonesifer said.

The meeting also didn't produce a clear result. "There was lots of shared information that may lead to more things," she said. "There was no action plan associated with it."

One theme critics of the Gates Foundation have seized upon is a lack of transparency, which a wealthy private confab may not help.

"Now they're in a tricky public perception problem," said Palmer. "This is not just for Gates but Soros or any philanthropists that have as much money to spend as small governments."

"It just gives the impression they were trying to coordinate in some way, which makes some people uncomfortable," she said.

"This is a group of people that are in the spotlight," Stonesifer responded. "They use that spotlight for good to draw attention to these issues. The only reason it wasn't more public was that it was a private and informal gathering to discuss these issues."

And there may be more such forums in the future. "I'm sure these folks will convene in one form or another," Stonesifer said. "This area of giving requires people to collaborate and learn lessons from each other."

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving its annual million dollar award for global health to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The school was created more than a century ago to treat far-flung British citizens dying of tropical diseases that were new to colonial doctors.

Now, as Britain's national school of public health, it's being honored for cutting-edge research and a commitment to training health workers in poor countries and post-conflict situations.

It's the first academic institution to win, and it plans to use the money to train more people around the world to work in public health.

Interesting that one of the experts it trained was David McCoy, the main author of the recent article in The Lancet critical of the Gates Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from the school.

The award to the London School will be presented May 28 during the Global Health Council's annual conference in Washington, D.C.

The Gates Foundation has pledged $40 million to independent think tanks in developing countries, starting with a 24 institutions in Africa.

The aim of the initiative is to provide long-term funding to organizations so they can produce sound research that influences national policy debate and decision making, said Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy for the Gates Foundation's global development program.

The Gates Foundation and two partners, Canada's International Development Research Centre and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, pledged a combined $90 million in grants to the effort.

"Effective development in a sustainable way really only happens when you have committed national governments putting in place the right policies based on the right information..." Suzman said. "There's a limit to what outsiders can do even with the right intentions."

The grants will go to organizations focusing on economics, technology, social and environmental policy, in countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ethiopia and Senegal. Four think tanks were funded in Kenya and Nigeria and three in Tanzania. A complete list is here.

Although the funding is unrestricted, Suzman said the think tanks are expected to do research in many of the areas where the Gates Foundation works.

"We do hope and expect much of the work they do will support areas we at the foundation care a lot about, like health, agriculture and financial services," he said.

One focus of the research will be agricultural development.

"We know that African countries nominally committed to spend 10 percent of their national budgets on agricultural issues," Suzman said. "The question is what is the best way to spend those resources. The answers need to be locally based."

The think tanks receiving grants range from very small and new, with only a couple of employees, to older, more established institutions. More than 300 submitted applications. They are required to be independent of government with no links to a political party and a track record of peer-reviewed, evidence-based research, Suzman said.

But some of their work will involve gathering the most basic data.

"It's important not to underestimate just how little knowledge is available in some countries of things we take for granted," he said. "What is the real distribution of poverty, what are the regions where things are working well or not? Often they just don't have that information at hand."

(This post was co-written by Sandi Doughton)

Low-key grumbling from critics for some time has suggested that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation lacks sufficient transparency and accountability and places too much emphasis on high-tech solutions.

Now one of the world's premier medical journals is drawing some of the same conclusions after an analysis of the foundation's health spending over 10 years.

"The foundation's emphasis on technology... can detract attention" from the basic causes of health problems and can skew the health spending priorities of poor countries, the main author, David McCoy, writes in one of a series of articles coming out Friday in the medical journal The Lancet. McCoy is senior clinical associate at University College London.

As the largest private foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation itself defies precedent in its ability to influence global health. The foundation's spending on global health was nearly equal to the World Health Organization's annual budget in 2007.

Yet the Gates Foundation is not held accountable, nor is it open about the way it sets priorities and awards grants, according to the Lancet analysis.

"What are the foundation's future plans?" asks an editorial. "It's hard to know for sure."

The world's biggest philanthropy is upfront about being "driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family," but that's a "whimsical" way to exert such enormous power on the world stage, says an editorial accompanying the analysis.

"We think it's important that he (Bill Gates) hears some of the perspectives from others," said Robert E. Black, chairman of the department of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the lead author of a commentary published along with the Lancet analysis. "He can choose to ignore it, if he wants, but honestly, I think he cares about doing things that really matter."

Black is in Seattle this week, attending a Gates-funded program on stillbirths and premature births, and said he hopes the Gates Foundation won't react defensively.

"I hope they take it in the constructive way in which it was meant," he said.

The analysis finds that more than half of the philanthropy's $9 billion in spending went to just 20 organizations. Among universities, about 60 percent of the foundation's research funding went to eight institutions in the U.S. and the U.K.

As a result those organizations and universities now have "privileged status" and are able to exert huge influence over global health policies worldwide, the articles say.

Gates Foundation spokeswoman Karen Lowry Miller said the foundation welcomed the article and its findings.

"We're totally open to this and will take all of this into consideration," she said. "Our strategy is constantly evolving."

Tadataka "Tachi" Yamada, president of the foundation's global health program, plans to meet with McCoy in the future, she said. The foundation is also preparing to publish more information on its Web site about its approach to grants, decision-making process and strategy, Miller said.

Over the past decade, more than a third of the funding went to research and development or basic sciences, "a technological bias that reflects the priorities of Bill Gates himself," McCoy writes.

Most childhood deaths result from a lack of access to basic needs such as food, housing, water and safe employment. Rather than looking for a clinical solution, "a better approach might be to view it as a public health problem that needs a social, economic or political intervention to ensure universal access to clean water and sanitation," McCoy writes.

"We think we have a strong global health strategy that really gets to the problems of the developing world," Miller responded. "We're not trying to be everything. We're trying to be where we can have the most value."

Black, of Johns Hopkins, has received Gates funding. And though he joked that he may not receive anymore, he said he's convinced that Bill and Melinda Gates are committed to improving health around the world.

"I know their motivations are good, and I hope their responsiveness is, too," Black said.

In his commentary, he said the foundation's emphasis on future solutions, like new vaccines and drugs, ignores the fact that treatments and health strategies that are known to work are not being implemented.

By promoting new vaccines, for example, the foundation puts pressure on developing nations to adopt those vaccines -- even though they may be expensive. As a result, countries may neglect things like basic treatment for pneumonia or promotion for breastfeeding.

The foundation could see a quicker payoff if it would instead focus on research on ways to improve delivery of health care, and the best ways to get people to take simple steps that boost health, like breast feeding their babies, he said.

"Two-thirds of global child deaths could be prevented if existing interventions were fully implemented," the commentary says.

The journal was not without praise.

"The Gates Foundation has added renewed dynamism, credibility and attractiveness to global health," the Lancet said in an editorial.

But McCoy's analysis concludes that grant making by the Gates Foundation seems to be largely managed through an informal system of personal networks and relationships rather than by a more transparent process based on independent and technical peer review.

The article singles out Seattle-based PATH, which was awarded nearly $1 billion, saying the amount "raises the question as to whether some organizations might be better characterized as agents of the foundation rather than as independent grantees."

It also brought up the question of accountability in grants to the International Finance Corp. and World Bank.

"The promotion of the private sector, including for-profit companies, raises a more fundamental question about the mandate and role of a foundation in promoting and shaping policies on core health systems issues... to whom is the Gates Foundation accountable for the promotion of such policies?"

Bill Gates Sr., lawyer, philanthropist and father of the richest man in the world, grew up in fear of being poor. He still eats at Burgermaster, and he turns the lights off every time he leaves a room, a lesson from the Great Depression. Gates has just published a memoir of the values and experiences that shaped his 83 years, called "Showing up for Life," which he discusses in this recent interview.

Q: You sum up your book's main point as "we are in this life together and we need each other." Is this a world view?

A: It's a world view. It's easy to have this sharing of responsibility among people, particularly among neighborhoods. We've clearly gotten to the point where there's a sense of sharing 7,000 miles away. There's really nothing complicated about it. A simple business of recognizing to start with we are all so interdependent. There's just no getting around it. We have to be helpful to each other or it would be an impossible world. This is not only good religion but very practical for economy and humanity.

Q: You described part of your childhood in the Depression, when your father walked home and collected chunks of coal by the side of the road for heat. What lasting effect did that have on you?

A: It's there. I never leave a room empty without turning the lights out. That is absolutely a habit learned from my father. I'm very surprised at the number of people today that don't turn out the lights when they leave, including relatives of mine. To some extent that's a product of this basic sense that comfort and a good life are always at risk, and there is another thing that happens to people called poverty. My children really don't have any notion of that.

KEN LAMBERT/SEATTLE TIMES

Q: What has moved you the most in your travels?

A: A couple months ago I was in India with Bill and we went back into this slum area to see a little girl, Hashmin, who had contracted polio. It was a terrible thing against this worldwide very muscular effort going on to rid the world of polio. It was very affecting to see this little girl, but at the same time very energizing to continue the pressure on this subject.

I can remember as a father thinking about the possibility of my children getting polio. No parent thinks about that anymore because it doesn't happen.... The trip in India was the first time I'd been on an overseas (foundation) trip with Bill. It was something he organized and we had his two sisters along as well.

Q: You've spent more than 10 years working at the Gates Foundation, where you're one of three co-chairs. What do you think have been its most successful and least successful efforts?

A: Set aside all the things in progress. We don't have any grade for them up or down. Some things we are doing are so long term. A vaccine for AIDS ... we've got a good many years ahead of us before we have the answer if it's a useful exercise or a waste of time.

I do think the delivery of vaccines in the poor world ... couldn't be left out of the list of positive results of the foundation's work. Literally millions of kids are receiving the vaccines. Without putting figures on it, at least thousands of kids who had the benefit of a good regimen of vaccines are not going to get sick and die prematurely.

The work we're doing in education, while it's been very good and delivered a lot of value to kids is something we've decided the strategy we were using ... wasn't a bit clear [whether] it was ever going to go to scale, and we needed to look at other factors than the size of high schools ... and think about things that were a bit more fundamental, like the quality of teaching and the standards we've applied to judge our own success.

Q: What is the biggest change since your son started working at the foundation full time?

A: There's nothing very big in terms of fundamental changes. He and Melinda continue to be the ultimate deciders in the most important issues that come along. The change I notice is he and she, particularly he, are there more often and as a result participate more in understanding the new projects and status of old projects. They're just more involved.

Q: Do you ever get veto power?

A: No.

Q: In your philanthropy work with your son, are there any areas where you didn't see eye to eye on an issue?

A: He and I have a different view about the duration of a life of a foundation. He is of the school that believes they should not be perpetual and they should end, and I am a believer in the perpetual foundation. I don't know that it's actually a major difference of opinion. This foundation is going to end at a precisely defined time. People like Rockefeller [Foundation] are going to go on until who knows.

Q: Why do you believe in perpetual foundations?

A: It's bad to spend all the money when you have a large corpus working and earning funds. I think when you finally spend it all it's a wonderful gift to someone or something... 10 or 20 times the size of grants you've been making up to that point, so that's good stuff. But then it's over and all the things that are under way and good things that might be [are not funded] because it's gone.

Q: What do you think about the criticism that the foundation is too heavily focused on technology solutions?

A: Actually I don't think there's any validity to that. It seems to me kind of nonsense. It's a question of what works. We've got so many lessons over the past decade about technology contributing to efficiency, accomplishing things that otherwise would be impossible. To be honest I don't understand what technology the critics are talking about. If they mean vaccines, it's sheer nonsense. There's isn't any question of the value of creating a vaccine that would rid the world of malaria.

Q: What about the criticism that the foundation has too much influence because of its enormous assets, yet only a small number of people making decisions -- three co-chairs and three trustees.

A: We try to ameliorate that in the case of three major program advisory groups with knowledgeable, mature experienced people who get together and review the programs. Getting their input and advice is a fairly significant safeguard against the potential for bad decisions with such a very few minds working on it.

Another thing that wouldn't be obvious is the whole business of mature, experienced personnel that have everything to do with what we do and decide to do. We have people in global health who know as much about global health as there is to know. The decisions of what we're doing go though that mechanism to start with.

There's a lot of safeguards against it both in additional outside advice and internal expertise. But I go on to say in a hurry, notwithstanding, that we very likely will miss one somewhere here or there. I would just offer the same thing is true with foundations that have 50-person boards or 15-person boards.

Q: Getting back to raising Bill Gates, I read about the famous water-throwing incident at the table. At some point you realized you could not control him.

A: I couldn't control myself was the problem. Nobody can really control their kids -- it's just [a] natural universal phenomenon. Kids get to the point they begin to feel their selfness, their worthiness and that naturally generates a resistance to somebody imposing their will on them. That was the garden variety problem we were dealing with. It started at a bit younger age because he started thinking very independently and thoughtfully at an earlier age than at most kids.

Q: What are the values you imparted to him?

A: I guess I would think about what values he has and go on and say we played some part in all of that, but incidentally not a controlling part -- his curiosity, his energy, getting answers to things, his sense of the appropriateness of hard work. Being a hard worker, which he clearly is and was, he had some examples of around his own household, although I would say not solely credited to us. But his sense of the interdependency of humanity, of him and others in the world, is something he got at least some confirmation of around the dinner table at home.

Q: And what characteristics of his surprise you ... that you don't recognize in yourself?

A: I suppose his well known proclivity for being argumentative and even ... quite challenging of the suggestions and ideas that other people are expressing. It's wonderful to sit around the table with him when people are talking about what makes sense and what doesn't make sense but he comes into those discussions very strongly. It's an indication of his immense self confidence. It's a characteristic I'm not going to be able to explain where it came from.

Q: In your book you talk about attending church, and your wife quoted a passage from the Bible at your son's wedding. Do you think faith in any way motivates your son's philanthropy now?

A: I think I'll stay away from that. You can ask him that question someday.

Update: Gates will discuss his book May 19 at the Seattle Chamber of Commerce Legends & Leaders program.

It's World Malaria Day, and this year everyone from celebrities to CEOs to the President of the free world is stumping for the cause... actually I was ready to bet that Ashton Kutcher had already forgotten about it, but I see he's still Tweeting away.

How much impact are these good intentions and money spent on malaria prevention efforts actually having?

Earlier this year, the statistics the Gates Foundation was using to promote its success in reducing malaria, based on WHO data circulating at the time, were questioned as inflated.

The claim was that African countries have made rapid progress against the disease using low-tech methods such as insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying.

In less than three years, for example, Zambia has seen a 50 percent drop in the number of children infected by malaria parasites and a 29 percent drop in overall child deaths, the Gates Foundation said.

William Easterly, a professor at New York University, traced the claims back to Dr. Arata Kochi, the former WHO malaria chief, reporting 50 to 60 percent reductions in deaths of children in countries such as Zambia and Ethiopia to celebrate the victories of the anti-malaria campaign.

A more recent World Malaria Report made no such claims, saying that in most countries, "the links between interventions and trends remain ambiguous."

In African countries "where a high proportion of people have access to antimalarial drugs or insecticidal nets, such as Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Mali, Niger and Togo, routine surveillance data do not yet show, unequivocally, the expected reductions in morbidity and mortality," the report said. "Either the data are incomplete, or the effects of interventions are small."

COURTESY OF PATH

Kent Campbell, a veteran of the U.S. CDC, is director of the Malaria Control Program at PATH.

I asked Kent Campbell, who is in charge of malaria control efforts at PATH, what he thought of the discrepancies. He could not entirely explain them, but he said the difficulty in measuring malaria is related to diagnosis.

For an officer at a clinic in Africa seeing 200 children every morning and trying to keep a tally of their problems and treatments, "the question is what is malaria? ... you don't have a laboratory. You don't know who has parasites."

Some things like pneumonia also cause fevers and can look indistinguishable from malaria.

In Ethiopia, it's hard to pinpoint trends because 2007 was the first survey done there, and malaria incidence across the country was patchy, he said. Some improvements should be seen after a massive distribution of bednets since then.

But Campbell knows the data well in Zambia, a country he says can clearly show the relationship between steps to prevent and treat malaria and positive results. PATH's MACEPA program has partnered with the Zambian government for four years to try to demonstrate that even in one of the poorest countries in Africa, where malaria causes about 20 percent of childhood deaths, the right strategies can cut that rate dramatically.

Based on more recent data in Zambia "malaria has dropped by over 50 percent, absolutely," Campbell said. "There's no question about it."

But Zambia (and other places making consistent progress, like Rwanda) borders countries that might not be so aggressive with prevention measures, and malarial mosquitoes know no national boundaries.

Another reason to continue bednet campaigns: according to the World Malaria Report, only six countries in Africa had sufficient nets to cover at least half of the people at risk: Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Sao Tome and Principe and Zambia.

DonorsChoose.org, one of a growing number of online charities that solicit help directly from the public, received a boost today from the Gates Foundation.

A $4.1 million Gates Foundation grant will help DonorsChoose fund half the cost of classroom projects developed by teachers to help students in low income families get ready for college.

Using an online model similar to Kiva.org, DonorsChoose lets teachers describe their projects, and individuals browsing the site can decide whether to support them. DonorsChoose then distributes the supplies to the schools.

TV personality Stephen Colbert was around to "moderate" the event, keeping the potentially vehement charity announcement from becoming too extreme.

JASON DECROW / ASSOCIATED PRESS

TV personality Stephen Colbert serves on the board of DonorsChoose.org when he's not running for president, making ice cream or warding off marauding animals.

"As I endeavor to protect our children from bears, DonorsChoose.org is protecting public school kids from classrooms that lack the materials necessary to rigorously prepare them for college," Colbert said. He's a board member of DonorsChoose.org. But considering the organization has 13 other board members and 26 advisers, he's really not that special.

Schools in the Seattle area are using the online tool to raise money for specific projects.

A class in South Seattle raised $561 from 24 donors on the site after requesting donations for "science books and videos about electricity and Benjamin Franklin, as well as an electricity poster and DC-volt meter for 30 young scientists."

The teacher said she aims to integrate science and social studies using a science kit and lessons about Franklin and literacy, describing her 4th grade class in a school with high poverty rates where "many of us are new to the United States and almost all of us are new to science."

Donors, teachers and students interact in forums on the Web site. A donor named Sara wrote: "I gave to this project because I grew up going to school in south Seattle. I know it isn't the most perfect place, but I love the diversity there."

Under the "Double Your Impact" initiative funded by Gates, requests that promote college-readiness will be eligible for 50 percent funding from DonorsChoose. Projects would include things like student trips to college campuses, classroom books and SAT/ACT preparation materials.

So far, 88,000 public and charter school teachers have used DonorsChoose to raise more than $30 million for books, art supplies, technology and other materials.

Vicki Phillips, director of education at the Gates Foundation, said she hopes the partnership will give individual donors an added incentive to support projects to see them fully funded.

Colbert had one burning question for Phillips: "Does Bill Gates ever talk about me?"

UPDATE: The project mentioned above, at Thurgood Marshall Elementary, received 12 donations in the last 24 hours and is now fully funded.

Rajiv Shah, the 36-year-old director of agricultural development at the Gates Foundation, was nominated today as an Under Secretary and Chief Scientist within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to a White House press release.

PRASHANT PANJIAR

He has been nominated to head Research, Education, and Economics at the USDA, where he would have jurisdiction over food safety issues, energy and climate, agricultural productivity and global food security.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called Shah "a globally recognized leader in science, health and economics ... disciplines that are critical to the missions of this department."

Shah, who joined the Gates Foundation in 2001, previously served as health care policy adviser on Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. A native of Detroit, he has a medical degree and a master's degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shah is considered one of the Gates Foundation's sharpest executives. His bio is here.

He lives in Seattle with his wife, Shivam, and their two young children. He is a trustee of the Seattle Community College District and a board member of the Seattle Public Library.

A local group called AGRA Watch is taking aim at some of the strategies for improving agricultural production supported by the Gates Foundation.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), was created and funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations in an effort to help small farmers improve productivity by using better seeds, fertilizer, irrigation and access to broader markets.

AGRA Watch calls that approach "politically, environmentally, socially, and ethically problematic." It's too heavily focused on technology solutions such as genetic modification, fertilizer and pesticides, rather than what could be more ecological farming methods and indigenous practices, say the group of volunteers, who are part of the Community Alliance for Global Justice.

The Gates Foundation has said it will consider many different methods to improve farming, but that soil in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa lacks sufficient nitrogen for organic agriculture alone.

AGRA Watch is holding a series of talks next month at the University of Washington. While the topic has provoked polite and somewhat indirect debate in two recent forums, rarely have local groups come forward with such an openly critical position on one of the Gates Foundation's programs.

Finding the right answers has become more urgent as the dally food intake of many of the world's poorest people dropped in the recent food crisis, and climate change complicates the problem.

Phil Bereano, UW professor emeritus in technical communication, kicks off the group's meetings April 1 with a critique of Gates' support of technology and the assumption that technology is in itself neutral. Other sessions are planned on genetically modified seeds, problems of the original Green Revolution in Africa and the role large agribusiness plays.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to open a European office in London this year.

The new office will work on public policy, led by Geoffrey Lamb, a former World Bank vice president who advises the foundation on international policy development. Lamb, an Irish citizen, most recently accompanied Gates to meet with the Obama Administration and European leaders, urging them to maintain funding for global health and education despite the economic crisis.

The London office "will allow the foundation to deepen relationships with its Europe-based partners, liaise with grantees, and work closely with governments, European institutions, and non-governmental organizations," the Gates Foundation said in a statement. The office will initially employ five or six people. Lamb will be based in Washington DC, but oversee hiring of the London director.

It will be the foundation's fourth office outside its Seattle headquarters, after Washington D.C., New Delhi and Beijing.

The Gates Foundation's grant to a cocoa industry group is raising questions about labor rights.

The foundation said this week it will give $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation and $25 million to a German development agency to help farmers in West Africa improve production and obtain higher prices for their cocoa and cashews.

The non-profit World Cocoa Foundation represents 70 chocolate companies, and most have not lived up to an agreement they signed to stop the worst forms of child labor in their cocoa supply chains, according to the International Labor Rights Forum.

Almost eight years after the major chocolate companies signed an agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, they have not instituted programs to ensure that they are complying with international labor standards, says Tim Newman, the group's campaigns assistant in Washington D.C.

"After millions of dollars and many years, it appears that the chocolate companies, through their charitable organizations, are not having a broad impact on improving the lives of children on cocoa farms," Newman wrote in response to the Gates announcement.

Richard Rogers, Gates Foundation program officer in agricultural development, answered my questions today about the labor issues. He said commercial involvement is necessary for the project to succeed.

The debate reflects a gap between those who question corporate involvement in global development and the Gates' view that embraces such public-private partnerships.

By having the private sector directly involved, "farmers can have a clear understanding of what the market demands," he said. Companies will contribute technical and managerial skills and resources to help farmers develop better seed varieties and plants and post-harvest handling methods.

Rogers said he chose the World Cocoa Foundation for the grant because "they have the best network of connections with governments, NGOs and corporate partners we feel are critical to this project."

Historically, the cocoa companies have worked "in silos," Rogers said, but the Gates Foundation has tried to play a role bringing them together for the first time, "getting all these companies to share their best practices and technical innovations to have maximum impact."

Hershey, Kraft Foods, Mars, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill were among those contributing $42 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Gates project. Those contributions "enable our dollars to go twice as far," Rogers said.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of the world's cocoa, earning just $30 to $110 a year, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

The goal is to drive up income for the 2 million small farmers in the region who earn a living through cocoa production by addressing the root cause of child labor -- low income.

When families are struggling to get food on the table every day, they need the whole family to chip in and work on farm farms, he said. "One of first things farmers do when incomes improve is send their kids to school."

But others argue that unfair trade policies lie at the root of the problem.

Stephanie Celt, director of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, said she agrees with the message the Gates Foundation is sending that "current free trade policy is not bringing promised benefits to many family farmers and agricultural workers around the world." However, she added, "we hope that the foundation will also recognize that programs such as this one only have a chance of creating long-term benefits if they are partnered with more comprehensive reforms to the trade policies that are keeping many agricultural workers in poverty."

The Washington D.C.-based World Cocoa Foundation will re-grant virtually all the Gates funds to three non-profits working in Africa, Rogers said, after using some to hire a project director, coordinator and finance specialist, and a few management consultants.

Rogers said he believes the chocolate companies are working to help solve child labor problems, but "the challenge is the constant monitoring. It's difficult to be monitoring 2 million farmers 24 hours a day."

The International Cocoa Initiative has some information and reports here.

"Certain groups will always feel there could be more done," he said. "As long as companies are abiding by their commitments and putting effort toward ending child labor, we feel satisfied with that."

I asked why organic farming isn't a part of the project. Roger responded that farmers can decide themselves what to grow. While "organic, single origin markets have been growing, they are relatively small, he said.

"We want to have large scale impact and reach the largest number of farmers. To do that we need to get at the mainstream market. Most people aren't willing to pay the premium for specialty chocolates."

One goal is to improve diversification of crops, but cocoa is the main focus because it gives more bang for the buck. For a farmer on less than 3 hectares of land, about 25 percent would be dedicated to growing cocoa, but cocoa would contribute half of the farmer's income.

Raising income may be the one way to find common ground.

"If all of us can agree that improving income is the key to improving livelihood," Rogers says, "we have a great opportunity in front of us."

At least not for many farmers.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of all cocoa, satisfying the world's cravings for chocolate while staying on the verge of starvation themselves. Annual incomes average $30 to $110 per household member, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

In West Africa, farmers might get half of the international cocoa price, while in other countries farmers are getting up to 90 percent of that price, says Rajiv Shah, agricultural development director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

ALAN BERNER/SEATTLE TIMES

Cocoa production has a bitter history in West Africa

Trying to raise the margins for farmers, the foundation is giving $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation, a non-profit industry group of 70 companies, in a partnership to improve productivity and market access.

Some of the World Cocoa Foundation's members, including Hershey and Mars, have been criticized by the International Labor Rights Forum for failing to honor their commitment to ending child labor and ensuring transparency in cocoa supply chains. Here is the 2009 company scorecard.

Hershey, Kraft Foods, and Mars, along with Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, were among those contributing $42 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Gates project. Starbucks was also one of the corporate sponsors.

The money will go toward hiring local extension workers to train farmers and provide much needed technical and management support.

The five-year project will reach about 200,000 small cocoa farming households in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria, with the goal of doubling their incomes by 2013, says Shah.

While farmers in Malaysia produce 800 to 1,000 kilograms of cocoa per hectare, those in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire produce 200 to 500 kilograms per hectare, he said.

"We can double or triple that just by improving the use of best practices, appropriate fertilizers and better tending to the trees," Shah said. "That's a big output gain."

West Africa produces a third of the world's cashews, but the lack of processing facilities in Africa makes the market inefficient and denies Africans the economic benefits of jobs in the sector.

With a $25 million Gates grant to the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the cashew project aims to help 150,000 small cashew farming households in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Mozambique increase their incomes by 50 percent over the next three years.

GTZ will lead the cashew project with assistance from the African Cashew Alliance (ACA), FairMatch Support and TechnoServe. Financial supporters include Kraft Foods and Costco Wholesale.

The roots of the problem of poverty behind sweetness are related to free trade, structural adjustment, and corporate control, says the group Global Exchange, which promotes fair trade products.

Prices are low because "major chocolate and cocoa processing companies have refused to take any steps to ensure stable and sufficient prices for cocoa producers," the group said.

Fair trade advocates may take a dim view of the program, considering that fair trade is not the aim of the corporations involved.

World Cocoa Foundation President Bill Guyton says the Gates-funded program is "looking at improving environmental, economic and social aspects of growing the crop," but that his group "does not get involved with certification of products."

Still there is one thing that both sides can agree on as a benefit: cutting out the middleman.

Few know better than the Gates Foundation how important results are to mobilizing people and money to tackle a problem such as malaria.

But those results are hard to pinpoint accurately, it seems. William Easterly takes a look at some of the recent malaria success claims and finds some of them to be overstated.

KATHY WILLENS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bill Gates announced $168 million in funding toward malaria vaccine research at a UN Millennium Development Goals Malaria Summit in September.

Here's what the Gates Foundation said, and we reported, last September:

Several African countries have made progress against the disease using low-tech methods such as bed nets and indoor spraying. In Ethiopia, for example, 70 percent of households in high-risk areas now have at least one insecticide treated bed net and indoor spraying, and effective medicines are available nationwide to treat malaria.

In less than three years, Zambia has seen a 50 percent drop in the number of children infected by malaria parasites and a 29 percent drop in overall child mortality, which experts say is almost certainly due to the wider distribution of insecticide treated bed nets.

Now Easterly cites this more recent WHO malaria report, which takes a step back. The effects of malaria control in Zambia were "less clear," and in Ethiopia, "the expected effects" of malaria control are "not yet visible," he says, quoting the report.

Indeed, other than four countries with small populations -- Eritrea, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, and Zanzibar (in Tanzania) -- in many other cases "the links between interventions and trends remain ambiguous," the report concludes.

In an interview from Davos recently, Bill and Melinda Gates repeated "numbers that have already been discredited," Easterly says.

He traces the claims back to Dr. Arata Kochi, the former WHO malaria chief, reporting 50 to 60 percent reductions in deaths of children in Zambia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda to celebrate the victories of the anti-malaria campaign. Kochi had rushed conclusions from a preliminary report that was never verified, Easterly says.

Easterly admits to his own philosophical differences with Gates, who he says hated his recent book. The NYU economics professor jokes he recovered from the criticism only after "months of intensive psychotherapy."

Easterly has dismissed foreign aid and "creative capitalism" as solutions to help the poor in developing countries, which he says could benefit more from plain old capitalism in the form of foreign investment. One of the other main differences seems to be that Easterly is basically a pessimist and Gates an optimist.

As for evaluating malaria control progress, this could be a key task for the UW's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and its director, Christopher Murray. While financed by the Gates Foundation, the institute has not held off from reporting critical results.

Heidi Sinclair, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's chief communications officer, is leaving her position at the end of the month.

A Seattle native, she has directed public relations since joining the foundation in September 2007. Her job description includes "protecting and advancing the foundation's reputation, increasing awareness of foundation issues, and overseeing our external and internal communications."

In a brief e-mail today, Sinclair said she is starting her own consultancy in Seattle, adding that she is "sad to leave the foundation, but very excited about the business I will build."

A Gates Foundation spokesperson confirmed her departure at the end of February.

Sinclair came to the foundation from public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, where she was president and CEO for Europe. During her tenure, as the size of the Gates Foundation doubled to about 700 employees, she built the foundation's current communications team and applied principles of corporate PR, striving for a uniform message presented in a controlled way to select media.

And while the Gates Foundation has tried to tighten control of its public image, critics say it still lacks openness and transparency. The foundation has cited its creation of outside advisory panels, an annual letter from Bill Gates and an overhaul of its Web site in response.

The foundation is currently conducting an executive search to replace Sinclair, who reports directly to Chief Executive Jeff Raikes.

The great Gates vacuum keeps pulling them in from points far and wide, with news today that the former director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Elias Zerhouni, is now a senior fellow at the Gates Foundation. NIH is the country's largest funder of biomedical research.

Zerhouni served under the Bush Administration from his appointment in 2002 until he left in October. There he helped "enhance synergy between all 27 NIH institutes and centers and fund compelling research initiatives of potential high impact," says the Gates Foundation. In 2006 Congress institutionalized many of his reforms.

Zerhouni also became controversial for banning NIH scientists from consulting with drug and medical device makers, and during his tenure, the NIH budgets stagnated. The New England Journal of Medicine noted that funding doubled between 1998 and 2003, but flattened afterward. In 2007 the budget was the first real reduction in NIH support since 1970.

Born in Algeria, Zerhouni came to the United States at age 24 with a medical degree from the University of Algiers School of Medicine and finished his training at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he worked as chair of Radiology Department, vice dean for research and executive vice dean.

Besides being a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, he will serve on the board of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

His task now is to "spur innovative solutions" as he advises the foundation on its global health programs, particularly the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative.

For more innovative solutions, maybe they should just hire this company.

It's a sign of the times that whenever a Gates Foundation employee speaks in public, the question and answer session becomes an audition for would-be job candidates. You can save the world and still wear Prada, too.

MICHEL EULER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Shaping the post-crisis world with an economy on edge.

Gates Foundation CFO Alexander Friedman spoke to the Trade Development Alliance in Seattle this week, offering such a clear, detailed and unvarnished analysis of the market it's amazing there was no run on banks.

The talk came after Bill Gates revealed his foundation lost 20 percent of its assets in 2008 but vowed to push ahead this year, and just before Gates headed to Davos to urge other non-profits, businesses and governments to do the same.

In Friedman's analysis, the roots of this crisis date back a long time. In the 1980s, the current account balance flipped as the U.S. began importing more than it exported. At the same time, Americans started saving less.

Interest rates came down from the ultra-high levels of the late 1970s and early 1980s; largely as a result, home ownership surged from the mid-1990s until 2007. Subprime loans grew from about 6 percent of all loans to 20 percent. And most mortgages, rather than being held by the banks that made them, increasingly were packaged together and sold as securities.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

Davos: a spectacle of wealth, power and debate... but less caviar.

With money so cheap, investment banks borrowed more to increase their profits. Consumers went on a debt-fueled spending spree, borrowing against their homes and loading up their credit cards. When the bubble finally burst and defaults started rising, mortgage-backed securities went from 100 cents on the dollar to 15 cents on the dollar. About $2 trillion in securities were downgraded.

How much could it all cost to fix? To shore up the financial system, U.S. government agencies have committed almost $8.5 trillion, even before the $819 billion stimulus package. That's about half of the U.S. GDP, and the single largest expenditure in American history.

Looking at various financial crises over the last 30 years, the minimum losses from this one appear to be far more severe -- almost double the losses from Japan's banking crisis of the 1990s and triple those of the Asian financial crisis.

Global markets have fallen in tandem with the U.S. What's the net result? Poverty is likely to rise sharply, especially in the poorest countries.

The World Bank estimates 20 million more people will go into extreme poverty for every one percentage point drop in developing countries' growth rate. Overall growth rates of developing and emerging economies are projected to fall from 8 percent in 2007 to about 5 percent in 2009. Robust African growth rates of 5 or 6 percent are almost certain to drop, too. Add at least another 60 million to the 100 million people pushed into poverty by the food crisis

So back to Gates' mission. Poor countries, especially in Africa, depend on foreign aid, which typically makes up 10 to 25 percent of their GDP. Aid has disproportionately gone into education and health, so those programs will be hit hard if it falls.

The prospects for aid look fairly grim throughout much of the world, said Friedman.

United States: Could be reduced or stretched out over longer period.
Japan: Flat or falling, unless aid becomes part of an anti-deflationary package.
Italy: Threatened 50% cut in bilateral aid program..
France: Official intent is to flat-line aid, but internal discussions indicate cuts.
United Kingdom: Holding firm -- so far.
Canada: Flat to negative.
Gulf states: Falling oil prices and financial contagion likely to minimize their role.
Nordic countries and Netherlands: Maintaining aid targets for now, but ministers say that's politically unsustainable if big donor countries cut theirs.

Gates is holding a press conference Friday to call on global leaders to maintain their commitments.

Meanwhile, Friedman thinks consumer debt, commercial real estate and private equity could be the next trouble spots in the U.S. economy. Big commercial banks may not be prepared for much higher unemployment levels and the related defaults, he said. Still he's trying to stay optimistic.

"When you're in a crisis, you tend to think the sky's falling," he said. "When you look at a 5 or 10-year horizon you adopt a more positive frame."

"We're trying to address diseases that are essentially Biblical..." Friedman said. "They've been around thousands of years... so the time frame of two or four years is something we can't let distract us."

On Monday morning Bill Gates will hit the send key to share with the world his first annual letter as full-time philanthropist. Stay tuned for reports on the conference call to follow.

No doubt he'll reflect on the work he's doing post-Microsoft (excellent timing!) and the challenges of staying on track to reach long-term development goals during a global economic downturn.

He hints in this interview on NPR that he may let people send him e-mail. What would you have to say?

If you've been feeling a strong gust blowing toward the Northwest, it's probably the suction from the Gates Foundation vacuum, which seems to draw every expert from around the world into its lucrative doorway, from the World Bank and the UN to the government of Mexico and the former Clinton Administration.

UNAIDS

Peter Piot will work for the foundation through April.

Tom Paulson at the PI has an interesting interview with UNAIDS founding director Peter Piot, who will work for several months at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, advising the non-profit about its global health strategy. Piot is also known for discovering the Ebola virus.

Under Piot, the UN once assessed the HIV/AIDS epidemic at nearly 40 million people worldwide infected and more than 4 million new cases a year. Later, it revised those numbers downward, slashing its estimate of total cases by about 7 million and lowering the estimate of new infections 40 percent. Some critics had accused the agency of deliberately inflating the numbers, but Piot said it was a matter of using new methodologies to assess the situation.

Here's the story mentioning problems with world health data, and here's one in which Piot comments on the Gates Foundation's plan to address HIV/AIDS in China.