Bill Gates, who will formally resign from Microsoft later this year, took the spotlight at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Friday as he pledged $306 million to improve agriculture in Africa.
In announcing the grants, Gates called on wealthy companies to engage in “creative capitalism.”
“If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women,” Gates said. “The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor.”
Gates told the summit, “Thirty years, 20 years, 10 years ago, my focus was totally on how the magic of software could change the world.” But he said technology innovation is not enough to solve problems and change lives in the third world. “If we are going to have a serious chance of changing their lives, we will need another level of innovation. Not just technology innovation — we need system innovation.”
Noting that capitalism tends to benefit people in “inverse proportion to their need,” he offered a refinement of the capitalist model, one that reflects the human desire to help others as well as the drive to make money. In the current schema, wealthy nations donate money to poor countries, but there’s never enough money to meet the need.
“Such a system would have a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces. To make the system sustainable, we need to use profit incentives whenever we can,” he said.
Since profits are hard to come by when serving the very poor, Gates suggested another “market-based incentive” — recognition. Because recognition for good work attracts customers and employees, it “triggers a market-based reward for good behavior,” he said.
Gates described…