Nigel Parry for Newsweek
Thanks
to PMC for this article. By
Michelle Goldberg, 7th
May, 2012.
She
plans to use the Gates Foundation's billions to revolutionize
contraception worldwide. The Catholic right is pushing back. Is she
ready for the political firestorm ahead?
In
the 12 years since Melinda Gates and her husband, Bill, created the
Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization,
she has done a lot of traveling. A reserved woman who has long been
wary of the public glare attached to the Gates name, she comes alive,
her associates say, when she’s visiting the foundation’s projects
in remote corners of the world. “You get her out in the field with
a group of women, sitting on a mat or under a tree or in a hut, she
is totally in her element, totally comfortable,” says Gary
Darmstadt, director of family health at the foundation’s global
health program.
Visiting
vaccine programs in sub-Saharan Africa, Gates would often ask women
at remote clinics what else they needed. Very often, she says, they
would speak urgently about birth control. “Women sitting on a
bench, 20 of them, immediately they’ll start speaking out and
saying, ‘I wish I had that injection I used to get,’” says
Gates. “‘I came to this clinic three months ago, and I got my
injection. I came last week, and I couldn’t get it, and I’m here
again.’”
They
were talking about Depo-Provera, which is popular in many poor
countries because women need to take it only four times a year, and
because they can hide it, if necessary, from unsupportive husbands.
As Gates discovered, injectable contraceptives, like many other forms
of birth control, are frequently out of stock in clinics in the
developing world, a result of both funding shortages and supply-chain
problems. Women
would tell her that they’d left their farms and walked for hours,
sometimes with children in tow, often without the knowledge of their
husbands, in their fruitless search for the shot. “I was just
stunned by how vociferous women were about what they wanted,” she
says.
Because
of those women, Gates made a decision that’s likely to change lives
all over the world. As she revealed in an exclusive interview with
Newsweek, she has decided to
make family planning her signature issue and primary public health a
priority. “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she
says. She is sitting in an office in the Gates Foundation’s
900,000-square-foot headquarters in downtown Seattle, a pair of airy
boomerang-shaped buildings flooded with natural light. It was here at
headquarters late last year that she announced her new emphasis on
contraception at an all-staff meeting, to thrilled applause.
Now
the foundation, which is worth almost $34 billion, is putting her
agenda into practice. In July it’s teaming up with the British
government to cosponsor a summit of world leaders in London, to start
raising the $4 billion the foundation says it will cost to get 120
million more women access to contraceptives by 2020. And in a move
that could be hugely significant for American women, it is pouring
money into the long-neglected field of contraceptive research,
seeking entirely new methods of birth control. Ultimately Gates hopes
to galvanize a global movement. “When I started to realize that
that needed to get done in family planning, I finally said, OK, I’m
the person that’s going to do that,” she says.
