The foundation has made a few grants to drive online learning, but we are just at the start of this work. So far technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will surprise people in how it can improve things—especially in combination with face-to-face learning. With the escalating costs of education, an advance here would be very timely.
Most of us have had a teacher whose lectures made a subject seem fascinating even though we didn’t expect that it would be. If you are going to take the time to listen to a lecture, you should hear it from the very best. Now that finding and watching videos is a standard part of the Internet experience, we can put great teachers’ lectures online.
A number of universities are already putting lectures online for free. You can find a lot of these courses at sites like www.academicearth.org
. I particularly like the physics courses by Walter Lewin and the solid-state chemistry course by Donald Sadoway, both from MIT. When I want to learn a new concept like the Carnot limit on getting usable energy out of heat, I often will watch lectures from different courses to see how it is explained and test my understanding.But online learning can be more than lectures. Another element involves presenting information in an interactive form, which can be used to find out what a student knows and doesn’t know. This makes it possible to tailor the learning session to the individual student. Think about what happens to students who get into community college but are told to take remedial math because their test scores are below a cutoff level. The students have to spend time on the things they already know and don’t get to focus on the areas they are confused about. They get very little positive reinforcement from sitting in lectures. Most kids who are put into remedial math drop out before they ever get a degree because it is such a discouraging experience for them. On the other hand, the online system can quickly diagnose what the students know, provide positive feedback, and make sure their time is spent really improving the conceptual areas where they are weak.
We need to bring together the video and interactive pieces for K–12 and college courses. We should focus on having at least one great course online for each subject rather than lots of mediocre courses. Once we have this material in place, it can be used in many different ways. A teacher can watch and learn how to make a subject more interesting. A teacher can assign subsets of the material to students who are behind and finding something difficult. A teacher can suggest online material to a student who is ahead and wants to learn more. A teacher can assign an interactive session to diagnose where a student is weak and make sure they get practice on the areas that are difficult for them. Self-motivated students can take entire courses on their own. If they want to prove they learned the material to help qualify for a job, a trusted accreditation service independent from any school should be able to verify their abilities.
There is a lot of online material being developed, but it isn’t organized in a way where it is easy to find the best material that fits what you want to do. If you search online for a video on photosynthesis, you get tens of thousands of results, including a lot of student projects. Which one is best for teaching kids of different ages and different pre-existing knowledge? We need a simple way of taking all of the education pieces and organizing them and then rating them in context.
One step that would help is having course standards that break down all of the various things to be learned into a clear framework and connecting the online material to this framework. Over time I think a large community of contributors and reviewers will develop and allow the online material to be easy to access and a crucial resource for all types of education. There will need to be a number of pilots to see how to take this resource and blend it into the classroom experience. I plan to spend a lot of time on this to see what would help get it to critical mass.
There is a question of how much of the online material will be free and how much will be paid for. Some of the best interactive software for K–8 learning is being done by startups using interactivity in innovative ways. These companies are licensing the software on a per-classroom and/or per-student basis. Ideally we would get market forces and nonprofit work to complement each other, but given that schools budget very little for software, it isn’t clear whether the marketplace will be large enough for the for-profit model to make a large contribution.
In the past few years, the foundation has begun to invest heavily in innovations that can increase agricultural productivity for the world’s poor. More than 1 billion people suffer from chronic hunger, and most of them are small farmers. We need to raise their productivity so that they have extra output, which can be saved for lean years, or sold so they can have money to send their kids to school. We will also need to feed the additional 3 billion people that will populate the earth in the next 50 years. People involved in agriculture care about both improving farm productivity and making sure farming is done in a sustainable way. Although these needs are often seen as mutually exclusive, they are actually quite complementary. They both depend on innovation, including new seeds, better training for farmers, and better access to inputs and markets. Some of the recent successful innovations in agriculture are documented in a book called Millions Fed, which you can download at www.ifpri.org/publication/millions-fed
.To make better seeds, scientists find two seeds, each with attractive characteristics—like being adapted to a local environment or having better productivity or disease resistance—and make one seed that combines the good traits. Breeding to get better seeds has been going on for thousands of years. When you see the original teosinte corn plant that is the father of today’s corn, it is hard to believe the two are related. But the change is due entirely to breeding controlled by humans.
There are three things that modern agrotechnology brings to this seed improvement process. The first is simply the ability to gather plant samples from all over the world and use databases to keep track of thousands of plants grown under different conditions. This has accelerated the progress in conventional breeding. The second is the ability to genetically sequence plants, just like we do with humans. We have some understanding of which parts of the genes control which characteristics, so when we cross two seeds we can look at the gene sequence of the resulting seed and know whether it has the characteristics we want. This is called marker-assisted breeding and it dramatically speeds up the cross-breeding process, because researchers don’t have to wait for the seed to grow before they know whether they’ve succeeded. The final technique is transgenics, where instead of just allowing cross-breeding to create the new seed genome, you actually take a gene and insert it. This is the approach that is still controversial for some people. But with the proper safety reviews, this technique can help create disease-resistant and drought-tolerant crops that could not be created any other way, protecting billions of dollars of harvest and increasing the food supply by millions of tons each year.
These modern techniques have been applied most aggressively to the big cash crops in rich countries. Just like in health, there isn’t a lot of market incentive to use the latest science for the needs of the poor. The foundation’s approach is to fund projects focused on the specific growing conditions in developing countries and the crops that are grown by poor farmers. Most of our grants involve marker-assisted breeding, but a few involve transgenics.
In December I visited the BECA Laboratory in Nairobi, Kenya, which is headed by a scientist named Segenet Kelemu. Their laboratory is doing state-of-the-art marker-assisted breeding to improve sorghum, cassava, and corn so the crops yield more food and resist pests, drought, and diseases. Segenet grew up in Ethiopia, moved away for graduate school, and worked in other countries for 25 years. But she chose to come back to Africa in 2007 to help develop a generation of plant scientists working to end Africa’s food insecurity. I was very impressed with the teams she has put together and the work they are doing with plant breeders throughout Africa. For products like sorghum, even when they can tell that a seed has all the right characteristics, they still have to develop varieties that also match local tastes, since unlike corn or wheat in rich countries there isn’t one standard form that everyone prefers.
The picture below shows you what a dramatic difference this kind of work can make. On the left you see sorghum that has been attacked by Striga, a devastating parasitic plant. On the right you see high-yield sorghum that has genes to prevent Striga from attacking. The difference to a small farmer between having the old seed or the new seed is the difference between starving and thriving.
Improvements in agriculture and health have relied heavily on the generosity of rich countries. But this generosity represents a much smaller portion of foreign aid than many people realize. Aid for health rose from $5.6 billion in 1990 to $21.8 billion in 2007, which was less than 14 percent of all foreign aid from rich countries that year. This money was incredibly well spent—saving a life for far less than a tenth of what is spent to save a life in rich countries.
In total, foreign aid from the richest countries in 2008 was $121 billion. Specific data is available at stats.oecd.org/qwids
, and it’s something I watch closely because the generosity of these governments is key to long-term success. Because of budget deficits, there is significant risk that aid budgets will either be cut or not increase much. In the table below, I show some countries’ budget deficits as a percentage of gross domestic product (or GDP, a measure of the overall size of the economy). Many of these percentages represent unprecedented peacetime deficits.
is a key partner in helping with this, and they have Bono’s brilliance as well as a strong staff. In October Melinda and I did a presentation we called “LIVING PROOF: Why We Are Impatient Optimists” to show how well government investments in health are working. You can watch it at www.livingproofproject.org. This version was focused on U.S. giving, but the message is even more appropriate for the rich countries that are even more generous than the United States.The best way to measure aid generosity is to look at it as a percentage of GDP. The most generous countries—Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Luxembourg—give 0.72 to 1 percent of GDP to foreign aid, which is phenomenal. Most other European donors give between 0.3 and 0.5 percent, and a majority have committed to get to 0.51 percent by 2010. France has traditionally been the strongest giver of this group, but in the mid-2000s their aid actually decreased a bit. Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom have all made significant increases over the last few years and are now close to or ahead of France. Italy was at the low end of European givers even before the Berlusconi government came in and cut the aid by over half, making them uniquely stingy among European donors. These cuts will show up in Italy’s 2009 aid figures. Bob Geldof put it well when he said the Italian government is suggesting “they want to balance their budget on the backs of the poor—how shameful.” In June, I met with Prime Minister Berlusconi personally to make the case for more support, but I was unsuccessful. This is a huge disappointment since I still think the Italian public wants to be as generous as people in other countries.
Canada and Australia are significant givers, at about 0.32 and 0.29 percent, respectively. Japan used to be a generous giver and has made some strong promises, but they are down at 0.20 percent. Unless the new government changes things for the better, they will fall short of their commitments.
There has been an effort to get Russia, China, and the rich oil countries to do substantial giving, but so far the numbers have been modest. South Korea, however, has become a significant giver, providing over $800 million last year, which is 0.09 percent of its GDP, with a commitment to increase to 0.25 percent by 2015.
The United States is the biggest giver in absolute terms, but in percentage terms gives only 0.19 percent. In recent years, a significant portion of this assistance went to reconstruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. If Congress passes President Obama’s proposal to double giving, however, the United States will get up into a very respectable range.
Deficits are not the only reason that aid budgets might change. Governments will also be increasing the money they spend to help reduce global warming. The final communiqué of the Copenhagen Summit, held last December, talks about mobilizing $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.
I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases. In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.
There are a lot of important topics I didn’t get around to in this letter. One area that I have been spending a lot of personal time on is energy and its effect on climate. The most important innovation required to avoid climate change will be a way of producing electricity that is cheaper than coal and that emits no greenhouse gases. There will be a huge market for this, and governments should supply large amounts of funding for basic R&D. Because the foundation invests in areas where there is not a big market, I have not yet seen a way that we can play a unique role here, but I am investing in several ideas outside the foundation. I am surprised that the climate debate hasn’t focused more on encouraging R&D since it is critical to getting to zero emissions. Still, I think it is likely that out of the many possible approaches, at least one scalable innovation will emerge in the next 20 years and be installed widely in the 20 years after that.
I have decided to take the notes I make after taking a trip, reading a book, or meeting with someone interesting and pull them together on a web site called www.gatesnotes.com. This will let me share thoughts on foundation-related topics and other areas on a regular basis. I expect to write about tuberculosis, U.S. state budgets, creative capitalism, and philanthropy in Asia, among other things. The trips I will document will include Nigeria, to check on the status of polio eradication; northern India, to understand more about improving vaccine coverage; and school visits in the United States. The site will complement my annual letters as well as the foundation’s web site, www.gatesfoundation.org, which has a lot more information about the topics in this letter.
My job is fun and interesting because of the great people I get to work with. Besides Melinda this includes our other co-chair—my dad. He is a tireless champion of making sure we keep listening to the people we want to serve and not letting our size get in the way of that. Jeff Raikes, CEO of the foundation, is doing an excellent job evolving how we run, making sure we hire great people, and creating an environment where they can do their best work. And I am always impressed with the dedication and in-depth knowledge of the foundation team, starting with the division presidents—Tachi Yamada, Sylvia Burwell, and Allan Golston. I feel very lucky to get to work with all of them.
