Gadgetory

every year Bill and Melinda Gates released a letter talking about their philanthropic efforts this year the letter is all about the future specifically how technology will dramatically change the lives of the poor in just the next 15 years that's exactly the sort of thing we think about at the version so we asked Bill Gates if he would be our guest editor in February as we explore the four areas he thinks will undergo the most change as you might have guessed bill agreed and I spent the afternoon with him talking about his vision for the next 15 years he also talked a little smack about Bitcoin its kind of especially here because the foundation is now 15 years old and also this year we have the UN looking at the Millennium Development Goals which were the world's parvis from 1990 to 2015 and adopting the next 15 years ago so what can we get done by 2030 so we pick health education farming and banking and say we think some very dramatic things can happen fact we go as far as to say we bet that life for the poorest will improve more in this 15-year period than it ever has before so let's get right into the four areas I want to start with health because I think that is where you're making both a set of big bets on what technology can do and on what just fixing the infrastructure can do so what are the sort of the two areas that you see happening now yeah health is where we've spent the most money the majority of our work has been there part of that is is the upstream science inventing new vaccines and part of its been the downstream once you have those vaccines how do you get them out to all the world's children we're raising the money so that the limited budgets of those countries don't block them from getting even the the very latest vaccine so one for diarrhea called rotavirus next five years will get out to all the kids one for respiratory disease called pneumococcus I will get out to all the all the kids and those two alone will save over half a million lives and that's why we think we can go from the 1 and 20 kids 5 percent who died before the age of 5 now 15 years from now get that down to be one in 40 in addition to health gates thinks farming will get far more productive for the world's poor well to get agricultural productivity up you want many factors working in your favor you want better seeds you want farmers to adopt the best seeds the farmers have got to be a lot more educated because they could often grow two crops in the season and the way they deal with soil health by rotating the crops can make a big difference they also need a credit system because if they don't have the money to get fertilizer that alone will cut their productivity very substantially and so that farmer education system that's sometimes called the Extension system the Rd to make those better seeds which is really very underfunded by managing those things well we predict that we'll get African productivity up to 1.5 times where it is today and that will get Africa to the point where even with its population growth somewhat worse whether instead of importing feet food it will be able to feed itself so when you talk about developing better seeds it's that to me sounds like you're talking about GMOs without really talking about GMOs is that a term that you're avoiding because it's a boogeyman even though when people figure out what GMOs are they're generally okay with it it seems like we're not talking about actually big AG companies doing GMO research well GMOs are very well accepted in some countries like the United States and not as well accepted in in Europe the African countries will have a choice of whether to use those tools and there is quite a bit of improvement still available with conventional breeding but in this time frame the GMO derived seeds will provide far better productivity better drought tolerant salinity tolerance and if the safety is proven then the African countries will be among the the biggest beneficiaries and so I you know by making sure that their safety review is well funded so it's all done on a basis the same as we do for medicines I mean after all medicines some are very dangerous and yet you know every country says if something goes for a safety review they're not going to deny themselves the benefit of a breakthrough medicine so I think most of Africa will see this as a way to improve their productivity but it's a it's a sovereign decision no no one makes that for them right so can you step in and provide so the like a quasi regulatory oversight and say you know we've invested in Monsanto we've invested in cargo we've looked at this and our foundation will provide the vouchsafe for these things or you're going to leave that up to each of these nations to do alone and they might not have the resources to do it but we can fund training so that they have scientists who can staff their safety commission we can make sure that the studies that they're done and done well we can incent the companies that are making these great seeds for rich countries we can work with them to make sure that it's at least available actually at a lower price because that tiered pricing where poor countries get a better prices worked so well in medicines that same type of thing we can make sure happens with these crops but at the end of the day you know they get to decide anything about which vaccines which drugs which seeds are okay you know that's that's their country but their expertise is is developing so I I feel like they'll you know they'll they'll make a good choice and I want to talk about pricing just real quick so I have a quote here from the UN conference on trade development 2013 report and I was gonna read it well fast the perception that there is a supply-side problem is questionable hunger and malnutrition are mainly related to the lack of purchasing power and/or inability of rural people to be self-sufficient and so I guess my question is is this really about developing more crops more more supply or is it really about the income inequality in this countries whether you you food doesn't magically move itself from one place to another you know otherwise you know the sinks of rich world homes you know all that nice stuff that you know it's good stuff clean doesn't get eaten it would be there and we do have population increase where Africa in particular will grow a lot and then we do have as people eat more meat they there's an inefficiency that you have to grow more to create the equivalent number of calories in meat so we have to increase world food productivity quite a bit almost double it by 2050 between all all the different factors and one of the few places where there's acreage that's not being used and that the productivity is way below the world average is in Africa and so it's wonderful that many of the poorest people in the world are African farmers getting their productivity up so they can have more nutritious food more food and meeting that global demand those two things are going to go together and so it's a huge win-win that as we help them we help feed the world let me ask it much more directly is it better to invest sort of in the supply side or is it better for you it's a very wealthy manager supply people food well the impact of a more productive seed used by millions of farmers it multiplies that Ardi investment you know by factors of a thousand that's right like writing a piece of software that millions of people get to use you know would I have been better to go to somebody's typewriter and type up a Word document for them or instead of using Excel I'm I'm actually good at multiplication I could have done the multiplication for them or should I create Excel and then it it can do a lot of multiplications for a lot of people so there is something that only philanthropy and government can come by and do and it's far more impactful than doing that as a handout the scale of government as a whole is gigantic compared to philanthropy plan 3 has to pick the risky diverse things that the mountain either the market or government were going to do an RD our pilot schemes to improve delivery those are the kinds of things that philanthropy is unique at driving forward Gates his vision for banking in finances perhaps his most idealistic he believes mobile payments and micro transactions will allow the world's poor more and better access to financial institutions and credit systems even if problems like regulation and technology lock-in aren't fully solved part of it is that the fixed cost of ATM machines and bank tellers and that means that small transactions are money losing in the old system there's just too much labor too much paper or too much physical activity in the new digital realm where we take and build a debit card equivalent that's just your cellphone as we've seen in a few pioneering countries like Kenya with a system called M pace our talk about the Bangladesh B cash that's a newer one but that's catching on pretty quickly there even 50-cent type transactions you can have an under two percent fee and so it starts to be economic to Bank the very poorest not with branches or ATMs but simply with the cell phone and so now all these benefits of ok I'm a farmer when I sell my crop help me to set aside enough for next year seed and fertilizer or my kids going to school help me do the set-aside so I won't be surprised when those fee requests come in that that is going to be delivered through that digital infrastructure so digital infrastructure is something that you are particularly expert in and so you know when I look at that I think that's great and the increased liquidity of transactions and assets when you move them to phones instead of cows obviously makes a lot of sense but the flip side of it is that you're offering a lot of power now to technology vendors who may not be in a market where poor people have enough market power to move off their platform or pick a better rate or do any of your normal things at consumers and otherwise regular technology marketplace would do how do you solve that problem where you're you want the best technology product to win or the most fair to consumers to win but because the vendors could get there first can lock people in might just necessarily run away with it no it's a good point the there's a need for a utility type service that lets you move money when you want to pay someone else pay a store so that you can pay a store no matter if they use the same bank if you do you can pay your relative in the rural areas no matter if you use a different bank or if you want to switch your account from bank one to bank two and so a lot of our work to get this low-cost digital debit card using the cell phone going is make the regulator has set up the right safeguards and that includes a money transfer system that has very low fees that lets and insisting that every bank that's licensed connect up and have these reasonable feeds it's kind of like phone number portability is in the mobile space that you can switch carrier or not have to change that phone number and so that's why the Foundation's role I'm working with these regulators and taking lessons from different countries will help get this into the the most pro-poor form we can so let me ask you that because there's another answer to this question so you're talking about relying on regulatory infrastructure and banks participating but there are many many investors and smart people out there who will tell you that the answer to these questions is Bitcoin so what do you think about Bitcoin is the solution of these problems well the the effort to make sure your Bitcoin provider isn't gonna lose your money and your understanding of the volatility of Bitcoin I'd hardly say that's ready for you know poor people to you know have it go up and down by a factor of two and you know oops I was at Mountain Talks now that's not good now I'm at you know bit whatever so that basic technology shows that digital can do these things very cheaply and the fees that have been built up over time won't stand up even for for small transactions now making sure that the thing is fraud resistant and money can be refunded there's somebody call up if you think you transfer to the wrong account or your counter balance is not what you expect and so I'm not thinking that the poor should get out there on like you know the cutting edge also governments for most transactions will want attribution that is the idea of a system or you can't see you know is that drug money is that terrorist money should that be taxed you're gonna have some tension between the attributed systems like credit card debit card systems where you there's actually a record of who's engaging and the purely anonymous ones but the one I see us getting the critical along with the government regulatory support we need is one where it's attributed where we can see who actually did this transaction gates also thinks education will dramatically improve in developing countries is online learning tools make it easier for students and teachers to connect around the world well the availability of the world's best teacher who can see where you're confused set the right pace for you we're all your engagement with that material your teacher or your parent or your friend can connect up and see where you're stuck and give you some advice we're not there yet we've met 15 years ago we were just sticking cameras in front of people and putting it online and saying okay isn't that the solution now people like Khan Academy and hundreds of others have said okay the Elektra piece is part of it but interactive problem sets and having your coach see what it is and understanding the nature of what you might be confused about and explaining to you why you should gather this knowledge and so the view is that over the next 15 years that type of material will be wildly better than even the best is today and it will be available through phones and tablets it won't replace face-to-face you know the social context the the relationship of that teacher but it'll it'll be planning gigantic role in letting you catch up move ahead and overcome whatever limitations your class size has so you might be the most famous motivated learner of all time and one thing that you had that when you talk with this vision that these kids might not have is you were surrounded by open systems by which you could tinker in play so I think about critical skills 15 years in the future and I think programming is one of those skills and building and hacking is one of those skills and if you're doing it on a phone even one of Microsoft's phones or Apple's phones are you doing it on tablet to some extent one of Microsoft's tablets one of Apple's tablets these systems are closed say don't you tinker and get in there how do you see like where do you see that next generation of hackers coming from that or all that they can't have access to soar the inside well I'm sure that it doesn't exist as well as it should today but there should be sand boxes even inside you know take the extreme case iOS where you can kind of have arbitrary code so you know we should be able to let people play around I'd have to say that the the priority of getting people coding and exposing a code that's something you know I'm the backer of code org and I think they're doing a good job you know a day of coding girls that code lots of good movement there because we're not dealing with the basics of reading and writing in these poor countries I think you know for the next 15 years most the Energy's gonna go into the basics so I'm enthused about people primary and I think we can enable it but our agendas is really at the the more basic level so I think this is really important it's something you bring up here a letter you talked a lot about the systemic inequality in education particularly developed world particularly for girls you haven't seen a lot about how you intend to address it you just acknowledge it's a problem and if you add the tools women with the means and motivation to use them will use them but how do you really attack the systemic inequality there well if you look at primary school enrollment secondary school enrollment fifteen years ago versus today countries are making a lot of progress on this the idea that parents you know should not keep the girl in the house should let her go out to primary school that's broadly accepted now we need to get there for secondary school you know the United States now Business School medical school you know male-female ratios are actually in some cases favoring the women it's still the sciences particularly the very hard sciences and particularly you should get up to the PhD level where we still have this huge gender imbalance it's it's a very cultural thing each country may have slightly different tactics of how they get the parents mindset about the investment in both boys and girls or you know equally valuable Eve equally important here on the verge we'll be hearing more from Bill Gates throughout the month effect because he narrates our series the big future and we write features about his areas of change