The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has been active in promoting Mobile Money projects around the world, over the past 14 years. In this year’s Reddit AMA, Bill Gates shares his views from his broad-ranging work around the world in poor and emerging countries where Bill and Melinda Gates have spearheaded projects to tackle a variety of problems, not the least of which is eradication of polio worldwide: India just went 3 years with no cases.
Bill Gates’ comments come at a time when Satya Nadella has just taken over as third CEO at Microsoft, and Gates gets back into the company, helping with product decisions.
There is much to enjoy in Bill Gates’ AMA, and we at Shift Thought drew particular inspiration in his comments on balancing business and philanthropy. As a budding start-up, at the end of a hard day we sometimes wonder if what we do is still enough. So hearing Bill Gates say “Just creating an innovative company is a huge contribution to the world” did pretty much make my day.
But this blog is about all things Digital Money. Over the last few years we’ve worked towards putting the various innovations in payments and remittances into a framework, to clearly differentiate the different categories, of which crypto-currencies is just one. So it was good to hear Bill Gates thoughts on this:
“The foundation is involved in digital money but unlike Bitcoin it would not be anonymous digital money. In Kenya M-pesa is being used for almost half of all transactions. Digital money has low transaction costs which is great for the poor because they need to do financial transactions with small amounts of money. Over the next 5 years I think digital money will catch on in India and parts of Africa and help the poorest a lot.”
As increasingly polar views form around Bitcoin and the ever-increasing numbers of virtual currencies, I think it is really important that people appreciate that crypto-currencies are not the only form of Digital Money, and therefore welcomed Gate’s comments.
And here are some of the other highlights of portions of the AMA that grabbed my attention:
- On Direct Cash transfers as a means of getting funding and aid to developing countries:
“I favor improving the health of a country to enable them to be self-sufficient. I will be interested to see how cash transfer works out - in some cases like helping someone pay a school fee it could be catalytic. Our focus is health and agriculture which can transform a country. As long as kids don't have enough nutrition a country won't be able to support itself.”
- On big issues for the USA to resolve domestically
“Education would be the top issue since it is key to individual opportunity and to the country as a whole and we are not doing as well as other countries. After that I would say immigration since the injustice of the current system is incredible.”
For a bit more perspective on the work of BMGF, a worthwhile read is the 2014 Gates Annual Letter, where Bill Gates shares his thoughts on what he believes are the biggest myths:
1. Poor Countries are doomed to stay poor – By 2035 there will be almost no poor countries left, visible through shared images of before-after transformations in Mexico City, Nairobi and Shanghai.
2. Foreign aid is a big waste – in their 14 years experience, Bill and Melinda have experienced first hand the real impact aid has. With Norway, the most generous nation in the world, development aid is still less than 3%, and for USA it is less than 1%.
3. Saving lives lead to overpopulation – Ever since Malthus expounded his theory in 1798, various scarcity based views abound, but “letting children die now so they don’t starve later” does not work.