Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh, in their article: Gates: Benevolent Dictator for Public Health?, ask us to imagine this scenario: “It is not inconceivable that you might find yourself some day reading a story about a Gates-funded health project, written up in a newspaper that gets its health coverage underwritten by Gates, reported by a journalist who attended a Gates-funded journalism training programme, citing data collected and analysed by scientists with grants from Gates.”
We need more analyses like this. It’s not so much the alarming implications that concern me — I may disagree with the Gates Foundation on their unfortunate focus on technological fixes, but they are moving the standards of practice in the field of philanthropy forward. I think we all need to be aware of the patterns of influence in civil society. Power in our sector is often a taboo topic, except when it’s an explosive one. Neither is conducive to positive change.
