‘No website that relieves diarrhoea’

Published Aug 12, 2013

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London - Bill Gates has criticised Google's plan to bring internet connectivity to developing countries using high-altitude balloons - saying that web access will do little for people dying of malaria.

The Microsoft founder, who is now one of the world's leading philanthropists, suggested that humanitarian efforts in very poor countries should focus on pressing practical problems like healthcare.

“When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that balloon and I'm not sure how it'll help you,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “When a kid gets diarrhoea, no, there's no website that relieves that. Certainly I'm a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary healthcare centres, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we're going to do something about malaria.”

Google's Project Loon was announced in June this year, and plans to use a series of high-altitude balloons to broadcast Wi-Fi over regions with poor infrastructure.

Initial tests with 30 balloons in New Zealand were successful, showing how the system could relay internet connections via ground-based receivers, providing access to the web in places where it was prohibitively expensive to install broadband cables.

Mr Gates, however, is sceptical of the long-term help such a project would offer. He said that whilst Google had originally set out to have a far broader remit with its philanthropic work, the company was now just doing “its core thing” by promoting internet connectivity. “The actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor,” Mr Gates said.

Mr Gates, the former Microsoft chief executive and current chairman, was speaking to the magazine about his work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic private foundation with an endowment of $36.2bn.

The foundation is particularly dedicated towards fighting the spread of malaria - a preventable and treatable disease that still kills hundreds of thousands of people each year. The foundation has committed $2bn in grants to date, helping to fund research and development for a vaccine, as well as helping deploy equipment such as mosquito nets.

Google's own charitable arm, Google.org, supports a range of projects, many of which have a technological bent. The Crisis Response project, for example, helps to provide tools for first responders in disaster situations. Responding to a question regarding individuals who are pursuing space travel as an “extracurricular interest”, Mr Gates said: “Everybody's got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don't see the direct connection. I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air.

“But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into.” - The Independent

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