Bill Gates
It is a great honor to receive the Goi Peace Award. The past recipients have been some of the world’s most visionary leaders, people who are thinking about how to meet the challenges of this century with exceptional courage and creativity. I am honored to be listed among them. And I am proud that the Goi Peace Foundation believes that the work we’re doing at the Gates Foundation is a part of the movement to create a more peaceful world.
My wife, Melinda, and I created our foundation because we are committed to the principle that all lives have equal value-that the poorest child in the poorest country is as precious as your child or mine. It is gratifying to know that so many people in this room also subscribe to this principle-and are convinced that it is a key ingredient for lasting peace in the world.
It is also great to be back in Japan. I have fond memories of this country. Back when Microsoft was just getting started, I spent a lot of time here working with my colleague and friend Kazuhiko Nishi. We had a chance to help create the worldwide personal computer industry by working with NEC and other great Japanese companies. We believed that the personal computer would make the world a smaller place with better communication and more rapid innovation.
We worked 24 hours a day, including Kazuhiko organizing our meetings with the leading companies here. Even during the night when we were sleeping, he would be making and receiving calls. One night, five hours went by without any interruption, and I woke up worried that maybe the interest in our work was slowing down.
One of the reasons that we did so well in Japan was that the businesses we talked to were as excited about innovation as we were. Both the small companies like Logic Systems, AI Systems and Sord and the big companies like NEC, Ricoh, Toshiba, Sony, and Matsushita put their most innovative engineers onto these projects.
We were convinced that computer technology was going to change the world for the better, and the Japanese companies partnering with us were extraordinarily receptive to this idea. Their work helped build the amazing personal computer and Internet advances that have had an incredibly positive impact on the world-from how we learn to how we communicate and how we do research.
Several decades since those early years, I can see more clearly than ever that our faith in the power of innovation was justified. I see that pace and breadth of innovation has been stronger than ever before with great promise for health, learning, food, and energy, touching every area of our lives.
When some people look at the world today, they see more disease, more poverty, and more ignorance. It is not hard to understand why. There is too much suffering. There is too little peace. Modern communication including the Internet makes it easier to see the suffering that still exists. But I believe these observers are missing the key trend.
The fact is, at any time scale you look at-in terms of millennia, centuries, or decades-the world is getting better. Healthier. Wealthier. More educated. More peaceful.
Archaeologists have shown that in ancient society where tribal warfare was the norm, the chances that someone would die by being killed by someone else were above 25 percent, and in some periods above 50 percent. In this last century, despite the large World Wars, the chances were close to one percent. So that’s progress.
Another statistic jumps out at us. Not quite 50 years ago, take the year 1960, 70 million babies were born, but that year 20 million young children died. Last year, 130 million babies were born, and 10 million children died. So, even though the number of births about doubled, the number of children’s deaths was cut in half.
This is surely a great achievement for humanity-one of the most important in the past 50 years. Saving lives alone needs no justification. It justifies itself. But the better health that this represents had a multiplier effect. As health improves, life improves in every way. Income goes up. Literacy goes up. Parents decide they don’t need to have as many children to make sure that some will support them in their older age. Ultimately, good health is a cornerstone of progress and a peaceful society.
Now, even 10 million children dying each year is still 10 million too many. The goal is zero. But if the world has already saved 10 million children, it can save 10 million more.
So I think it’s important to recognize the progress we’ve made, because it puts the future in a different perspective. The context for the work we need to accelerate is not a string of failures. It is a trend of long-term success.
And innovation is the key to that success. As the world contends with an economic crisis, innovation will continue to spur success, and it will have a broad effect as long as we don’t forget the people whose lives are difficult even in the best of times.
Innovations in communications technology have shrunk the world dramatically. Computers connect us all in an ever-smaller network. We can now text message, e-mail, and videoconference with people in an instant, and all over the world. On the Internet, we can see photos and videos minutes after they’re taken.
The old saying that we are all in this together has never seemed so real. People have always believed in bonds of mutual responsibility. That’s human nature, to help others. But now we can see how those bonds can be extended. They tie us not just to the people on our block or even in our city, but also to people in countries we’ll never set foot in.
So technology has brought new people and new problems to our attention. And it is also helping to solve those very problems. Every day, advances in science and technology are making it possible to save lives in entirely new ways. To diagnose and cure disease. To prevent disease in the first place.
Innovation doesn’t have to be just high-technology. It can be a better way to deliver medicines to hard-to-reach places. A smarter way to help small farmers get their crops to market. A more strategic way to encourage financial institutions to work with poor customers.
All these innovations are ongoing. We will continue to learn more about what needs to be done. We will continue to be able to do more.
Our task is to see to it that innovation is pointed in the right direction. To make sure that the best minds apply themselves to solving the most important problems. Because it doesn’t happen automatically.
Let’s take the example of malaria, which is one of the world’s worst diseases killing almost one million people every year, mostly children.
Yet the world spends substantially more on curing baldness than on curing malaria. That’s a market failure. Nobody dies from baldness, but a lot of people are both willing and able to pay for any improvement there. Any yet these hundreds of millions who would pay for malaria treatments don’t speak with a voice in the marketplace because they cannot afford them. I am certain we all agree that malaria should be far ahead of baldness on the world’s list of priorities.
So what can we do to make sure that we’re innovating on challenges like malaria in proportion to the incredible need? Philanthropy has an important role to play, and at the Gates Foundation we’re working with many partners on solutions. But we realize that we can only be part of the answer.
First, governments must lead the effort. They are the primary source of the world’s money to face the challenges of the developing world. Japan has made contributions through the G8 process. For example in 2000, it helped create the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Global Fund was a major innovation in global health financing, and it is already the biggest funder of malaria treatment in the world.
Second, research institutions must encourage their smartest scientists to focus on these important problems. Scientific institutions, whether in businesses or universities, are a primary source of the world’s expertise. At our Foundation, we have started an initiative called Grand Challenges Explorations, which gives small grants to help scientists test radical new ideas with the potential to advance global health. We’re placing bets on untested but provocative theories because real progress comes from path-breaking thinking. We just announced our first round of winners last month, including three here in Japan.
One of the grantees is Hiroyuki Matsuoka of Jichi Medical University. Professor Matsuoka’s idea is simply breathtaking. The way people get malaria is from a mosquito bite. But Professor Matsuoka envisions a mosquito that, when it bites you, delivers a vaccine against malaria, instead of the disease. Essentially, he is turning mosquitoes into a flying syringe.
Another winner is Hiroshi Kiyono of the University of Tokyo. Professor Kiyono is trying to create a new kind of vaccine that people can administer all by themselves. All you have to do is swallow it. It doesn’t have to be refrigerated. It doesn’t have to be injected by a health professional with a syringe. These potential breakthroughs are still at a very early stage, but breakthroughs like these have the potential to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Finally, we need to get very successful peoples and businesses to provide resources and entrepreneurial talent as well. Businesses have a great deal of the world’s expertise more than any other type of institution. And that expertise can be used to help the poorest. For example, one of the best tools we have for preventing malaria is insecticide treated bed nets. And experts at Sumitomo Chemical are building a better bed net.
Their net has insecticide infused in its fibers. Nobody has to spray insecticide on the net, and the insecticide doesn’t wash off. That means the net lasts for five years, which is much longer than normal nets. Sumitomo licensed its technology to a manufacturer in Tanzania, and it’s working closely with African governments to make sure that these nets are delivered to the families who need them.
These are just a few examples of researchers and companies doing the important work. We all need to do more-governments, businesses, philanthropists and all of us.
I know that, as I say we should do more, the world is in the midst of an economic crisis. It may be tempting for governments to focus exclusively on domestic concerns. It may seem appealing to businesses to focus their limitations to those desired by the wealthy consumers.
But this is a global crisis, and the fact that it’s global ought to reinforce the message that it is not wise to turn inward.
In our world, governments, businesses, and philanthropists in every country are connected to each other. The only long-term strategy for economic health and equity is more cooperation and more innovation. Indeed, the combination of cooperation and innovation is the path to peace.
Governments must be more generous. Universities must devote more resources to cutting-edge research. Philanthropists need to provide their resources to the needs of the poorest. Business must be more creative and thinking about how to solve the problems of the poorest. All of this is especially important now.
If everybody plays their part, then the world will keep getting better. It will get better much faster, and if so, we will be able to look back in 50 years and say that we saved hundreds of millions of lives. We will be able to say that ours was truly a century of peace.