Microsoft chairman says health care, not high tech, best route for aiding world's poor

Thursday, October 19, 2000

By DAN RICHMAN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Health care and literacy -- not computers -- are the most important ways to help the world's 4 billion poorest people, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said yesterday.

The remarks by the world's richest man, a confessed technophile whose creation of a software empire made him a multibillionaire, seemed to undercut the very essence of a three-day conference on the digital divide he was concluding on the Seattle waterfront.

The Creating Digital Dividends conference, sponsored by Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute and attended by some 300 representatives of high-tech companies, venture firms and governments, revolved around the thesis that technology can make both entrepreneurs and consumers out of people earning less than $1 a day.

"Let's be serious. Let's be serious," Gates said, sparring with moderator Scott Shuster , a Business Week editor. "Do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day? ... There are things those people need at that level other than technology. ... About 99 percent of the benefits of having (a PC) come when you've provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who's going to sit down and use it."

Gates is an ardent capitalist and technophile who also founded the $17 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He said the foundation puts 60 percent of its revenues into improving health and 30 percent into education.

It donated $30 million to a vaccination program in India last month and has committed more than $1 billion worldwide toward fighting disease and developing reproductive health care.

It was a difficult message for the technology-oriented audience to hear. But Gates -- relaxed and affable, with a candor and clarity he hasn't always shown -- didn't shy away from tackling the complex issue of how best to eliminate worldwide poverty, poor health and illiteracy.

Gates was asked whether the world shouldn't "lead with technology for economic development and watch health improve as a follow-on to that, as occurred here."

He answered, "One million people a year (in the U.S.) were not dying of measles when the microprocessor was invented."

Gates continued, "People with elephantiasis aren't going to be using their PCs. I'm suggesting that if someone's interested in equity, you wouldn't spend more than 20 percent of your time talking about computers. It's almost criminal more money isn't spent on curing malaria, which kills 1 million children a year."

He seemed even to question the very concept of a digital divide, noting that "most of the world doesn't have cars, but we don't talk about the auto divide."

But then he stressed that 90 percent of what the Microsoft Foundation does, and some part of what the Gates Foundation does, is devoted to closing that divide.

"Certainly some magical things can be done with software," he said, noting the Gates Foundation's donations of software to libraries and classrooms. He said all the money recovered from pirated software in foreign countries -- more than $50 million over the past five years -- is donated to job training for the jobless and teachers.

Asked whether he views the rural poor as a business opportunity for Microsoft -- another major theme at the conference -- he answered, "I will admit that in our business forecast, we don't have a significant percentage of our future growth even coming from people who live on $3 a day."

Then he was off again.

"Do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1 a day?" he said, repeating himself. "There's no electricity in that house. None. Is someone creating computers that don't require electricity?"

"There are solar-powered systems," Shuster ventured.

"No! There are no solar-powered systems for less than $1 a day!" Gates insisted. "You're buying food, you're trying to stay alive. You live in a different world!"

Giving up, Shuster replied meekly, "I'm just the moderator."

Gates relented.

He later questioned whether companies like Hewlett-Packard really make customers out of the world's poor. Last week that company announced a $1 billion Internet-access program and said it will try selling to 1 billion poor people, though not to the world's very poorest.

"The percentage of growth that an (information technology) firm like H-P will get from people whose income is less than $1 a day is not going to be that significant," he said.

P-I reporter Dan Richman can be reached at 206-448-8032 or danrichman@seattle-pi.com

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