BILL GATES: 2013 Was A Huge Year For The Things That Really Matter

December 27, 2013 Leave a comment

BILL GATES: 2013 Was A Huge Year For The Things That Really Matter

JULIE BORT

DEC. 26, 2013, 1:54 PM 13,417 28

Bill Gates is proud of how the world improved in 2013. “You’re probably seeing a lot of people’s year-end lists right now, going through the best movies, books, YouTube clips, grumpy cat memes, etc. I thought I would share a different kind of list: some of the good news you might have missed,” he wrote in a blog post. Here’s a summary of Gates’ 2013 Good News List, and we have to admit, this stuff is REALLY good

“We got smarter and faster at fighting polio.” An outbreak in the Horn of Africa was controlled in four month and that India hasn’t reported a case of polio in nearly three years.

“Child mortality went down—again.” Half as many children died in 2012 as in 1990. (A cup half-full way of looking at an awful problem.)

“The worldwide poverty rate went down—again.” The poverty rate has dropped by half since 1990, the Economist reported in June. Gates adds, “I never miss an issue of the Economist, and this might be the best piece they ran this year.”

“Rich countries re-committed to saving lives.” Gates points out renewed funding commitments to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria.

And next year, all of the world’s poorest countries will have access to a new vaccine called pentavalent. Gates is pretty excited about that, too. It’s called pentavalent “because it prevents five diseases,” Gates explained: Next year it will be available in South Sudan, the last of the 73 poorest countries to introduce it. India just announced that they’ll start giving it to every child in the nation in 2014. If other countries follow India’s example, pentavalent could prevent 7 million deaths by 2020. That’s 7 million more children protected from common, preventable childhood illnesses, in addition to the 440 million that an organization called GAVI has immunized since 2000, he says. The idea caused Gates to send this jubilant tweet:

bill-gates-tweet-deaths

Twitter/@BillGates

With so much bad news bombarding us daily, it’s nice to see how things improved, too.

Filed under Life

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment