No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey – review

Is his vast charity empire changing the world for the better? Or is Bill Gates playing God?

Ten years ago, when the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates was midway through his startling metamorphosis from monopolistic software magnate to possibly the world’s most admired philanthropist, he made a speech declaring that the traditional American high school was “obsolete”. Instead, his hugely generous charitable foundation invested $2bn in new, smaller schools for nearly 800,000 pupils.

But within a few years, in 2008, the funding abruptly stopped. Some of the schools had to close. Three years on, in one of his carefully rationed newspaper interviews, Gates explained: “The overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about – whether [pupils] go to college – it didn’t move the needle much … We didn’t see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that.”

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