When most people retire, their co-workers send them off by way of a party in a breakroom with a sheet cake. When Bill Gates retires, he gets a Hollywood-quality short comic film made for him starring Matthew McConaughey, Steven Spielberg, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, Jon Stewart and Jay-Z, among others.
But Bill Gates is a little different than the rest of us. Gates, who announced his retirement as CEO of Microsoft in January, let his audience share in his cinematic tribute during a talk for computer sciences, electrical and computer engineering majors Wednesday. And although there was mention in his talk of things such as gigabytes, source coding and user interface paradigms, Gates' focus was on the power of giving back.
Despite the fact that Gates is the second-richest man in the world, it's not his money that moves mountains, but his determination to use his field of expertise to find creative solutions to global problems. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he created seven years ago with his wife, has ballooned to become the largest charity in the world with a $37 billion endowment. It aims to eliminate diseases such as AIDS and malaria, but also improve the lives of, as Gates put it, "the lower 2 billion" citizens of the world, whose voices have no capital to power them.
But for Gates, positive change is not about dousing needy causes with money or even making technology more affordable and available. In the developing world, "even a 10-cent computer would not be that valuable," Gates said, because underdeveloped countries lack the essential literacy, support and accommodations necessary to even make use of technology.
Instead, Gates generates and applies innovative solutions to Third World countries using technology. For example, his foundation takes simpler machines, such as DVD players, to villages in sub-Saharan Africa to show farmers new, more effective farming techniques. When the farmers utilize better techniques and see the beneficial results, they give a shot of adrenaline to their economies and create a competitive atmosphere, thus providing them with incentive to continue to achieve, Gates explained. This tried-and-true capitalistic mentality, when applied to a developing area, drives global progress.
Gates admitted that he had little awareness of the developing world when he was a Harvard student in the 1970s. "Don't be as na've as I was about the human condition," he said.
Of course, things were a lot different back then. When Gates first started using computers in high school, the machines weren't even capable of producing lowercase letters. But just as technology has advanced at lightning speed, so can philanthropy, with help from our generation. The key, as Gates told us, is to be aware, to specialize based on what interests and excites us, and to take meaningful action starting at the university level. You don't need to be the richest man in the world to make a contribution. - L.F.
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