Tag Archive: global health

Child mortality continues to fall

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With the decline in extreme poverty. There’s been an overall improvement in global health. One such example: kids born in 2017 are much less likely to die in their first five years of life than kids born in 1990 were.

The global under-five mortality rate fell from 93 per 1,000 to 39 to 1,000, meaning it fell by over 58 percent!

We don’t have data for 2018 yet, but given the change just between 2015 and 2017, it’s likely there was a further decline.

In 2015, the under-five mortality rate fell from 42 to 39 worldwide, meaning overall deaths fell from 5.8 million to 5.4 million.

[Vox]

The real reason the world will remember Bill Gates

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William H. Gates, III, shall ultimately be remembered as the most significant person of his generation. It may not be for the reasons you think.

Bill Gates is eligible for consideration by virtue of founding Microsoft. For fourteen out of the fifteen years from 1995 to 2009 he was the richest person in the world. Such achievements, however, will likely seem small in the scope of history.

Consider the scale of the Gateses’ philanthropy.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through which their philanthropy flows is, according to Wikipedia, the largest “transparently operated private foundation in the world.”  Since inception, the Foundation has made grants of over $26 billion, including $15 billion in global health alone.

The annual giving of just the GlobalHealth program of the Foundation is about $800 million and approaches the scale of the United Nations World Health Organization.

A significant contribution to the Foundation was made by Warren Buffet in 2006, but most of the money in the Foundation has been provided by the Gateses. 

Gates is also famous for asking other billionaires to commit to giving away half their fortunes. Bill and his wife Melinda have committed to giving 95% of their fortune to charity over time; that is an astounding measure of generosity.