Invisible Children: Unintended Victims of Gates Foundation?

by Joseph Parker

Critical thinking is important; not just for our kids, but for us as well.

We should be considering every angle of every decision we make, or it may affect our kids in unintended ways!

I came across a front page article in the Los Angeles Times yesterday; an investigation into the Gates Foundation inadvertent affects of Africans due to their emphasis on victims of Aids and Malaria.

Here are a few short excerpts from the article dated December 16, 2007 by Charles Piller and Doug Smith:



* The focus on a few diseases has shortchanged basic needs such as nutrition and transportation, undermining the effectiveness of the foundation’s grants. Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment….


Deaths from AIDS fell sharply.



Dean Jamison, a health economist who was editor of Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, a Gates Foundation-funded reference book, blamed the pressing needs of Botswana’s AIDS patients. But he added that the Gates Foundation effort, with its tight focus on the epidemic, may have contributed to the broader health crisis by drawing the nation’s top clinicians away from primary care and child health.


“But if so, it is usually with less competent people.”…




…Bill Gates told CNBC earlier this year that GAVI vaccinations had “saved several million lives.”


Click here to read the full article.

When working with the “widow, the orphan, and the poor,” we must consider the unintended consequences…the collateral damage…caused by our lack of thinking, lack of research, and lack of willingness to do what it will take.

Granted, some will argue the Gates cannot help everyone (which I would agree)…that they are focusing on a specific need…but if even a small portion (a few million) of that money donated (in the billions) could go toward basic health needs, they could help a lot more people than they already are.

In the context of after school programs, mentoring, walking with kids and their families through life…

What are we doing…or not doing…that could be creating inadvertent, unintentional, victims in our desire to do good?

How could our desire to do the right thing be inadvertently be causing more problems?

Are we doing everything we possibly can for the Invisible Children in America?

Let me know what you think.


One response to “Invisible Children: Unintended Victims of Gates Foundation?

  1. Unfortunately the broader the base that you’re donating to the lower your oversight is. If aid is given for basic infrastructure across a whole society, oversight is near impossible and corruption and bad planning will take a huge bite out of the money that might have reached the people who need it.

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