The morality here is preceded by the maths. The Gateses have pledged to give away 95% of their colossal wealth, routinely estimated at $46 billion; their main interest is in vaccines and childhood immunisations for the developing world. In 2002, 10.5m African children under five died, 1.4m from diseases preventable by vaccination. The Gates Foundation enjoys a $28.8 billion endowment, giving some years more than the foreign-aid budget of Australia. Since they decided to "give the resources away" — as Melinda puts it with the breezy certainty of the do-right billionaire — at the height rather than at the end of their earning power, that figure will increase as the foundation matures. Their decision-making is famously fast, the donations dramatic; the $750m donation to Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi) in January is one of the largest-ever private gifts.
Launched in 2000 with Gates money, Gavi is a partnership of public and private bodies committed to saving lives through vaccination: the Gates Foundation, western and developing-world governments, pharmaceutical companies, the WHO, Unicef, NGOs. Mrs Gates talks modestly of her part in the alliance, but without her and her husband it would not exist. Gates has the muscle and respect of an independent state, offsetting the US government's heel-dragging on African aid. Early partners in the international finance facility — Gordon Brown's pet project through which bonds will be issued to raise money for international development — were France, Germany and the Gateses, a nation unto itself. It is ruled with autocratic benevolence by its maverick, misunderstood genius, Bill, who has handed over the daily running of Microsoft to concentrate on bestowing its fortune. At his side (rather than one step behind) is his wife of 11 years, Melinda French Gates, 41, the mother of their three children: Jennifer, 9, Rory, 6, Phoebe, 2. A graduate in computer science from Duke University with an MBA, the fast-talking Melinda French joined Microsoft as a manager in 1987, developing products including Encarta, Expedia and Cinemania, running a division of several hundred million dollars before leaving to be at home with her first child in 1996. Whatever her brilliance at making software saleable, she was also the brunette who snagged the boss when, as legend has it, the girls in his office wore T-shirts bearing the plea "Marry Me, Bill". Willie Nelson sang at the 1994 New Year's Day wedding party in Hawaii. We may have called Gates the ubergeek but his bride is still smitten; when she talks about him you'd think she had married George Clooney. Rich men so often use their assets to hook glossy glamour-pusses and high-maintenance trophies; Melinda Gates is neither, and soon after meeting her you can see why her husband — a serious-minded, obsessively curious man — chose her to share the swimming pool with the underwater music system. Unlike Gates, whose parents were members of the Seattle elite, Melinda French grew up in Dallas, the daughter of an aerospace engineer. She had no teenage angst about the Third World. Her goal was a place at a good university, then a job at Microsoft.
But her family had an expectation of volunteerism, and the motto of her Catholic high school was "Servum"; in that spirit she coached Mexican immigrant children in English. Mrs Gates is the ideal consort for her husband, a man, I'm told by one of his foundation colleagues, who is "uneasy with the language of emotion"; in her hands the business of giving seems entirely natural, silencing the cynics who complain that the foundation is an extravagant rebuttal of Microsoft's killer image. Perched on an armchair in an office at the foundation, she is dressed elegantly, swishly even, in cream silk blouse, cream pleated skirt and high heels. Serious carats sparkle as she gestures, but she laughs incredulously when I ask if she is a customer of couture. "I almost apologised for being so dressed up. It's only because I'm going straight on to a Microsoft event after this." She is an unusual rich man's wife, not only in her indifference to shopping and preening, but because, for all her warmth and good humour, one suspects Melinda Gates's business instincts are as sharp as the stilettos of the ladies with whom she declines to lunch. Her approach to philanthropy is hard-headed, goal-oriented, driven. As a tough businesswoman she expected results; so does she with the money she pours into her good works.
Had they lived in a different era, the Gateses would have inspired a line in Cole Porter's You're the Tops; America worships its successes, and their wealth has given the couple a celebrity that means they do not have to recruit ditsy pop ambassadors to their cause, though they support Bono's organisation Debt Aids Trade Africa (Data). They are their own best ambassadors.
"Seeing that this is important to Bill Gates has made people think maybe they should learn about it too," says his old friend Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive and now the foundation's voluntarily unpaid president. "After all, they wished they'd learnt about that PC stuff when he did. People think of Bill and Melinda as really smart — they wouldn't be wasting their time and money if it couldn't be done."
Because of its casual, latte-sipping, liberally inclined manner, the mistake was always to view Microsoft as less ruthless than its rivals. The same mistake would be made in ascribing those attributes to the foundation. The Gateses are firstly money-makers, secondly venture-philanthropists; they do not believe eradicating poverty is the prerequisite, rather that improving health will boost prosperity. Nor do they dwell on why Africa has been allowed to slip into its desolate isolation. Melinda Gates offers passion and cash but no attempt at political analysis; her husband has implicated the "failure of capitalism", but neither partner questions its ethics. Far from it — it is because they are market-driven creatures that they can give, and raise, such vast amounts for a cause that was once the domain of left-wing activists and magnates with a guilty conscience. As Melinda says, "Compared to the problem, we are a drop in the bucket."
Her foundation's eternal quest is for partners whom they can encourage, propel, lead by example. Since they launched Gavi in 2000, 11 governments have given hundreds of millions of dollars for vaccine purchase and distribution. In five years, 4m additional children have been vaccinated, with Africa a main beneficiary. Thanks to Gates-funded programmes, in the past three years 43m children have been vaccinated against hepatitis B. The target is to vaccinate 60% of the developing world by 2010; three years ago it was less than 4%.
How do you imagine the woman credited by the WHO with having helped save 670,000 lives? A halo and a pair of wings? An aura of moral superiority? What one admires about Melinda Gates is any hint that she considers herself to be doing anything remotely unusual. Africa is her passion, one she can afford to indulge, but then so are India, Haiti, Thailand, all so far from the heart of affluent, isolationist America, and so close to the heart of its most totemic couple. The swamps of Botswana are similarly far from the tidy principality of Seattle, but this small African state is the source of Melinda Gates's proudest achievement. It was chosen partly because of the progressive leadership of its president, Festus Mogae, for a pilot health initiative in which anti-retroviral drugs are available to all HIV-positive patients with severely impaired immunity. Financed by $50m from Gates and $50m from the pharmaceutical company Merck, 34,000 people are receiving the drugs.
Young and old are tested under the country's Know Your Status programme, and the government has made a commitment to lifelong treatment. In other words, Botswana's Aids sufferers are treated as they would be in Seattle. Two years ago, when Melinda Gates visited a hospital in the capital, Gaborone, over 80% of admissions were due to HIV/Aids; not once was it recorded as a cause of death. "When we started that programme there was no office, no phone, nothing, but we worked with the government and Merck and NGOs, and today we have 2,500 people trained in health care and delivering anti-retrovirals."
Less enlightened governments, incapacitated by denial, or corruption or laziness, can enrage her; she has wondered aloud why South Africans didn't "riot" for the treatment their government was withholding. "I get angry if I think the government's holding things up, so South Africa is a particularly difficult situation. We fund a youth-awareness programme there, Love Life . . . But it's a crime: South Africa should be the shining light of hope."
The question one wants to ask Mrs Gates is, why? She could have enjoyed a fragrant life, raising her children, indulging in fundraising for Seattle's arts, avoiding stress and irritation. "When Bill and I got married," she says in her quick, emphatic manner, "the idea was that we would give the resources away much later in our lives." Their first visit to Africa had been a 1993 safari; they were distracted from the wildlife by people in Zaire walking to market with no shoes, the women forced to carry water and babies for miles, and by the invitation from a Kenyan Masai tribe to attend a female circumcision. "And then we read the 1993 World Development Report and it just stunned us. We said, 'Kids are dying of diarrhoea, and basic illnesses that our kids are vaccinated against?' In our Microsoft analytic mode we said, 'Somebody must be getting facts wrong here.' It moved us to say we must get educated now, and the more we learnt the more we realised we couldn't wait, because these diseases don't wait. I took trips around the world and saw what it meant. Seeing a child dying of rotavirus isÉ unfathomable. My big fear was I'd come back so devastated I wouldn't be able to hope, but you see how the economy is changing in the developing world, how it is lifting itself up. That's what gets Bill and I up in the morning."
The newly married Gateses, who have adopted the dictum of Andrew Carnegie, "He who dies rich dies disgraced," started their giving cautiously by wiring US libraries to the internet. They have supported British libraries and endowed Cambridge scholarships, but as they woke up to the irrelevance of laptops to villages in disease-ridden sub-Sahara — which needed food and drugs and roads more than they needed Windows — the accent shifted. They are now self-taught experts on prophylactics and parasitic diseases. She devours textbooks on immunology, though maybe only one to her husband's five.
