On Thursday morning, Bill and Melinda Gates issued their annual letter—an update on the thoughts occupying the leaders of the $42 billion foundation that bears their name. The 2015 edition is based around a series of predictions about global progress over the next 15 years, and the authors bet that by 2030 we will have made some considerable advances.
As interesting as the progress they expect is the timing of their forecasts. The letter is clearly designed to influence a round of goal-setting negotiations that will be concluded by the world’s prime ministers and presidents at the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York in September. There’s also a hint the Gateses fear an implausible and broad UN agenda that prioritizes nothing by prioritizing everything.
According to the letter, it’s a good bet that child deaths will halve worldwide and that maternal deaths in childbirth will drop two-thirds by 2030. Polio, Guinea worm, elephantiasis, and river blindness will be wiped out, and the number of people beginning HIV treatment in sub-Saharan Africa will outstrip new infections, leading to the number of HIV cases finally dropping everywhere. African agriculture will become productive enough that the continent can feed itself, and 2 billion people worldwide will gain access to mobile banking. Overall, the Gateses suggest, the lives of people in poor countries “will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history.” It is a hopeful and heady vision.
It’s no coincidence that in September the United Nations will agree on a list of global goals and targets for progress over the same 15 years that are the focus of the Gates letter, tentatively titled the Sustainable Development Goals. The new goals are designed to guide development efforts and to hold global leaders to account, continuing on from a set of Millennium Development Goals agreed upon 15 years ago that targeted progress in poverty, health, education, gender equality, and the environment, and that have helped shape global development discussions over the past 10 years. The Gates letter is in part aimed at steering the UN goal-making process.
And though the Gateses write that some will think them irrationally optimistic, the draft of the new UN goals is considerably more ambitious than Bill and Melinda’s letter. According to the draft of the Sustainable Development Goals, by 2030 we will have wiped out AIDS and malaria rather than just turned the corner against them. We will have simply ended all preventable deaths of children under 5 worldwide rather than just reduced them. And the draft suggests we will have ended hunger and malnutrition worldwide not least by doubling smallholder production—a far stronger claim than the Gateses’ hope for a 50 percent rise in African agricultural productivity and that the continent will produce more foodstuffs than it consumes.
The bets in the Gates letter are far more likely to happen than the UN draft’s targets. Take child mortality: If countries follow similar rates of progress over the next 15 years as they have over the past decades of unprecedented progress, average global child mortality will decline by a little less than 50 percent from 2010 to 2030, ending at a global average of just fewer than 1 in 40 children dying before the age of 5—making the Gateses’ prediction ambitious but not implausible. But many countries will be above that global average. And at least 28 countries, mostly in Africa, would miss a UN 2030 “end preventable deaths” target, often taken to suggest fewer than 1 in 50 children dying in every country, even if they managed to halve and then halve again their mortality rate of 2010—a three-quarters decline in just 20 years.
The Gates letter also refrains from predictions in a lot of areas where the Sustainable Development Goals are (literally) incredibly ambitious. Among the long list of targets that suggest progress completely outside historical experience, the UN appears ready to suggest that by 2030 we will have provided jobs, houses, sanitation, and energy for all while achieving universal health coverage and secondary education alongside universal access to tertiary education worldwide. Added to that, we’ll have wiped out violence and discrimination against women and ended child-trafficking everywhere.
The Gates letter’s comparative modesty in coverage is partially about where their interests lie and the fact that they were writing a letter and not a book. The letter closes with a request that readers join Global Citizen, an organization that will push members to hold their leaders accountable for the goals they sign up for, “particularly those relating to the health of women and children”—a major focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s development work.
The Gateses’ annual letter is a shot across the bows of a United Nations effort that looks headed toward utopian irrelevance. It comes from two of global development’s best-known advocates and is a welcome attempt to rein in the excessive ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals. But UN negotiators are suggesting tweaks to the draft, not the radical surgery that’s badly needed. Sadly, it’s a bet with long odds that the Gates letter will alter the course of the negotiations over the next few months.
Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West.
