梅琳达•盖茨的头等大事：教会女性计划生育和避孕

    为了改善全球妇女和女孩的生活状况，梅琳达•盖茨表示，“仅仅口头谈论这个话题是不够的。”面对由女性首席执行官、高管和商界领袖组成的听众，她直言，人们必须得心甘情愿地调动起他们的声音、财力和人际网络，才能产生影响力。“我们必须站起来说：‘我愿意为这些事情提供资助。’”

    梅琳达•盖茨是一名慈善家，也是比尔和梅琳达•盖茨基金会（Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation）的联合创始人。在上周三于加利福尼亚州拉古纳尼格尔举行的《财富》最具影响力女性峰会（Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit）上，她接受了《财富》（Fortune）资深编辑帕蒂•塞勒斯的采访。

    作为全球最为活跃的民间基金会之一，盖茨基金会最近在美国《科学》（Science）杂志上表示，他们准备把妇女和女孩放在“未来发展的中心地位”。

    梅琳达表示：“我在基金会的工作之一就是实地考察。”她谈到了自己是如何离开城市中心，代表基金会去考察邻近的乡村和贫民窟，并与那里的女性交谈。梅琳达称，这一系列旅途让她更好地了解到这些女性的生活状况，以及盖茨经济会应当如何对她们的日常生活产生更大影响。梅琳达意识到，她的基金会还没有为广大女性做出很大的贡献。

    梅琳达表示：“作为一个基金会，我们做的是一些本质上比较封闭的工作”，她指的是基金会在根除疟疾和小儿麻痹症上的工作。“我们没有对女性和她们的家庭产生预期的影响力。我们需要让基金会更多地投入这方面的工作，还需要鼓动全世界更多地投入这方面的工作。”

    盖茨基金会起初是一个研发机构，工作重点在于大规模疾病防治。梅琳达表示：“我们也需要参与配发药品的工作。”仅仅研发出治疗疾病的疫苗或药剂是不够的，如果病危儿童的母亲根本拿不到这些疫苗或药剂的话，这些工作就没有意义。她说：“我想要确定我们对妇女和女孩们做了正确的事。”

    梅琳达还谈到了她认为最需要优先做的事：计划生育和避孕用品。她表示，计划生育可以改变一名女性的生命轨迹，乃至她孩子的人生。她说：“我们认为有大约1,400万女孩在18岁以前就结婚了”，而产妇死亡率“在全球仍然居高不下”。

    女性能否计划好怀孕的时间和频率，对女性的自我健康和经济发展至关重要。盖茨基金会的目标之一，就是为研发新型避孕用品提供资金。梅琳达特别提到了华盛顿大学（Washington University）一位科学家的研究工作，这位科学家试图研发一种能像薄荷糖一样在舌头下融化的口服避孕药。

    除了关注妇女和女孩之外，盖茨基金会还在努力帮助应对大规模疾病，并于近期捐助了5,000万美元用于对抗埃博拉病毒。基金会的领导者之一苏•德斯蒙德-赫尔曼预见了即将来临的危机，并说服了比尔和梅琳达投入资金进行早期防治。梅琳达表示，在尼日利亚，一家盖茨基金会赞助的小儿麻痹症诊所被改造成了一家紧急的埃博拉病毒诊所，并且已经帮助该国将埃博拉的病例数控制在了仅仅19例。

    当《财富》杂志总编辑艾伦•默里问到盖茨基金会是如何同世界卫生组织（World Health Organization）等政府机构合作时，梅琳达谈到了政府和民间合作的必要性。比如说，联合国儿童基金会（UNICEF）、盖茨基金会和华盛顿大学在类似的研究和卫生倡议问题上有着不同却互补的成果，利用这些差异，各组织能够促进彼此的工作。

    梅琳达表示：“在政府与民间的合作中，智慧的碰撞正是我们想要的。”（财富中文网）

    译者：严匡正

    In order to improve the lives of women and girls around the world, “it’s not enough to just to talk about women and girls,” Melinda Gates says. Speaking directly to an audience of women CEOs, executives, and business leaders, she said that people have to be willing to use their voice, dollars, and network in order to make an impact. “We have to be willing to stand up and say, ‘I’m willing to fund some of these things.'”

    Gates, a philanthropist and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was interviewed on Wednesday by Fortune senior editor-at-large Pattie Sellers at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit at Laguna Niguel, Calif.

    The Gates Foundation, one of the most active private foundations in the world, recently declared in Science magazine that it aims to put women and girls “at the center of development.”

    “One of the things that I’ve gotten to do for the foundation is really to travel,” Gates said. She talked about how she would break away from city centers during her trips on behalf of the organization to explore nearby villages and slums and speak to women who lived there. The side trips brought her a greater understanding of the lives they lived, she said, and how the Gates Foundation could have greater impact on their day-to-day existence. Gates realized her foundation wasn’t doing a lot for women at scale.

    “As a foundation, we do pre-siloed work,” she said, indicating its work on eradicating malaria and polio. “We weren’t getting the impact we wanted for women and their families,” she said. “We needed to move the foundation to do more of this work. We need to move the world to do more of this work.”

    The Gates Foundation was started as a research and development organization, with a focus on mass diseases. “We also need to do delivery,” Gates said. It wouldn’t be enough to create a vaccine or cure for a disease if the mothers of at-risk children wouldn’t allow its distribution. “I want to make sure we do the right thing for women and girls,” she said.

    Gates also spoke about her number-one priority: the importance of family planning and contraceptives. Family planning, she said, can change the trajectory of a woman’s life and the lives of her children. “We think about 14 million girls are married before the age of 18,” she said, and the maternal mortality rate is still “huge around the world.”

    The ability for a women to plan when and how often to have children is crucial for her health and key for her economic growth. One of the goals of the foundation is to fund research into new types of contraceptives. Gates spoke about a Washington University scientist who is looking to develop an oral contraceptive that would dissolve under a woman’s tongue like a breath mint.

    In addition to the focus on women and girls, the Gates Foundation is still looking to help tackle mass diseases, and recently gave $50 million towards the fight against Ebola. Gates Foundation head Sue Desmond-Hellmann saw the crisis coming and convinced Bill and Melinda Gates to put their money towards early prevention. Gates spoke about how a Gates Foundation-funded polio clinic in Nigeria decided to convert to an emergency Ebola clinic, helping that nation to keep its Ebola rate to only 19 cases.

    When asked by Fortune managing editor Alan Murray how the Gates Foundation works with governmental organizations like the World Health Organization, Gates spoke about the need for public-private partnerships. For instance, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, and the University of Washington might have different, but complementary, takes on how similar research and health initiatives, and use those differences to improve each other’s work.

    “Intellectual pushback is what you want in a private-public partnership,” she said.