Gates enthusiastic after first full-time year at foundation

The philanthropist Bill Gates says he loves his new job. It's easy to see why.

In 2009, working on health, development and educational issues for his foundation, he traveled around the world, playing a role that seemed equal parts financier, researcher and diplomat. He sat down for discussions with the leaders of India and Italy. And he even appeared in a documentary film.

In his first year of full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he described meeting with teachers in North Carolina, health workers in India and dairy farmers in Kenya.

"Seeing the work firsthand reminds me of how urgent the needs are as well as how challenging it is to get all the right pieces to come together," Gates wrote in an annual letter he plans to release today. He summed up the key role of his $34 billion foundation — the world's largest private charity — as investing in innovations that wouldn't otherwise be funded.

Over the past 200 years, innovations have doubled the average life span and provided cheap energy and more food; but without innovations in health, education, energy and food, the picture 10 years from now will be "quite bleak," he predicted.

Society is falling short in backing advancements that would benefit poor people, and in areas such as education and preventive health care, he said.

The foundation makes its biggest investment in vaccines, Gates said, spending more than $800 million a year and aiming to boost coverage of basic vaccines in poor countries.

Gates often has been asked why his foundation doesn't invest in solutions to climate change.

He said in his letter that since there's a huge market for clean energy, governments should supply the basic funding to develop it. Gates warned, though, against increases in government spending to reduce global warming that come at the expense of vaccines.

In Copenhagen last month, wealthy countries pledged $100 billion by 2020 to help developing countries address climate change. "If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases," Gates wrote.

But he also said vaccines aren't the whole solution. While childhood vaccinations and better malaria care have cut child deaths by 1 million since 2005, other kinds of problems are still wiping out almost 9 million children a year, almost half before they are 30 days old. It's essential to look at the causes of infant deaths in an integrated way in the context of mothers' health and family planning, Gates said.

One of the high-risk pilot projects Gates funded last year involved promoting circumcision among men to reduce HIV transmission. He reported how scientists working in a South African township have been able to get almost all men in the community to volunteer for the $40 surgery and create a model for other places with high rates of the disease.

Among world leaders, Gates' influence goes a long way, but apparently not far enough with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Gates said he met with him and "personally made the case" for Italy not to cut its foreign-aid budget.

Berlusconi did anyway, by half, "making them uniquely stingy among European donors," Gates wrote. "This is a huge disappointment since I still think the Italian public wants to be as generous as people in other countries."

Gates touched on his support for new seed technologies for agriculture, acknowledging genetic modification remains controversial. But he argued that "with the proper safety reviews, this technique can help create disease-resistant and drought-tolerant crops that couldn't not be created any other way, protecting billions of dollars of harvest and increasing the food supply by millions of tons each year."

In the area of education, Gates said he is in a new film, "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival about American education by Davis Guggenheim, who directed "An Inconvenient Truth."

Gates said he hopes the film will galvanize political will to improve teaching effectiveness.

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com