“…a future in which a small group of super-rich global elites…play an ever-larger role in global governance, organising trillions of dollars to remake the world according to their own narrow interests, calling it philanthropy.”

This is the crux of Tim Schwab’s new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. Bill Gates is just one of the many names listed in the quote above, made up of tech moguls, industrialists and marketers – a virtual who’s who of the Davos elite.

But how does one reconcile the whims and fancies of predominantly white billionaires who travel in private jets and yachts and own multiple million-dollar properties and assets by selling their commercial products to the world with the fate of billions of lives who don’t even have the means to purchase any of those products?

This book is a deep dive into exactly this conundrum. Gates is the “founding father,” if you will, of this new breed of billionaire philanthropists, who according to Schwab, don’t actually know anything about how philanthropy works. Yet, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the focus of the book, is in the billion-dollar industry of “doing good” – a dangerous misnomer which combines the need to do good with the practice of doing more harm than good.

As an investigative reporter, Schwab has dug as deep as possible (The Gates Foundation and many of its grant funding recipients refused to respond to any of his requests and queries) into not just the pockets of Bill Gates but also into a mind that is a part self-proclaimed genius and part control freak and master manipulator (by now we all know the story of how Gates cozied up with Jeffery Epstein in a bid to be nominated for the Nobel peace prize). He details an empire built on the premise of “saving the lives” of billions of poor across the world, who apparently cannot survive without the generous contributions of Bill Gates and his now former wife, Melinda.

Schwab details an empire built on the premise of “saving the lives” of billions of poor across the world.

Along the way, Schwab takes us through a myriad of failed projects and experiments conducted by the Gates Foundation in women, education, agriculture, health, journalism, family planning, scientific innovation and finally, the abject failure of a global vaccine for Covid-19. A private philanthropic family-run Foundation based on the wealth of a computer programmeis a damning indictment of what billionaire philanthropy has become because Gates and his self-proclaimed knowledge about issues such as global health and climate change are mired in a web of tax avoidance, lobbying with the White House and global corporations, lack of transparency in financial grant-making, conflict of interest of many high-level Gates Foundation staff (and the exploitation of lower-ranking employees) and control over global public resources. Global institutions such as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are Gate’s largest grant recipients and are heavily influenced by him. Both Bill and Melinda exhibit a condescending attitude of white saviourism that seeps through both their conversations and their approach to how the Foundation works. The chapter on White Man’s Burden explains this well.

Pakistan has also feted Bill Gates and his funding on many counts at the state level, including a recent visit related to polio prevention. Polio is Gates’s personal favourite over many global health crises. Post Covid-19 he is known to have partnered with big pharma.

What does this actually mean for philanthropy? What does this mean for global governance? Indeed, what does this mean for global inequality? Schwab has tried to bring these and other ethical questions to the fore. Can an institution founded by a rich and powerful white man and subject to his (and his former wife’s) whims be capable of doing good?

With the rise of (primarily white) billionaire philanthropy, there is a significant risk of issues such as climate change being hijacked by powerful people who lobby powerful governments. The Gates Foundation is one of those power brokers. This is a serious concern not just for philanthropy but also for aid and development and its discontents. If those who claim to want to save livesalso get to decide whose lives need saving,philanthropy has a huge problem.

The Bill Gates Problem

Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

Author: Tim Schwab

Publisher: Penguin Random House UK, 2023

Pages: 496, Paperback

Price: Rs4,095

The reviewer is an independent researcher and former development practitioner. She  is co-editor of White Saviorism: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences (2023). She lives in Karachi