World's poor headed for better lives in 2030: Gates

[JDPriestly]

8. I like the fact that Melinda Gates appreciates the importance of government's role in dealing

with poverty and improving people's lives.

Active in more than 100 countries, the foundation has more than $42 billion in endowments to fund projects and innovations, but the Gates said their work also focused on shaping policy with governments.

Non-governmental organizations can "show points of lights" when it comes to fighting poverty, but "it takes governments to scale those up."

http://news.yahoo.com/worlds-poor-headed-better-lives-2030-gates-042202519.html

In one of my many professional reincarnations, I worked for a homeless project primarily writing grants. We got some money from private foundations and funders, but they were reluctant or maybe I should say not very generous to a project that mostly helped homeless black men. It just seems like that wasn't a really feel-good charity, not something they could brag about to the elite social crowd they ran with. But who needs help more than homeless black men? Maybe homeless children? Cancer victims?

Certainly not a lot of the fun projects that private foundations like to fund.

Anyway, most of our money came from government grants. And it was the government funding agencies that carefully read our reports to them on our use of the money. It was the government funding agencies that checked to make sure that our applications were honest and not hyping our results. Government agencies in my many years of experience in writing and managing grants were far better than private agencies in determining whether our projects deserved funding, were really accomplishing what we claimed they were. So private grants are great but they do not monitor for results as well as do government funders.

I'm happy to see that the Gates are working well with the local governments. It's so important.

But whether technology will help the poor in the future depends on whether the poor get access to it, and that depends on whether they have the resources, especially the money, to afford the technology and to afford to use the technology on a day-to-day basis.

i'd like to see technology used to make sure people have clean water, a place to sleep, food and most important job opportunities here in America as well as in Africa.