Melinda Gates, the co-founder and primary driving force behind the most significant philanthropic entity in the world

In 1993, during Melinda French’s wedding shower, her mother, who was suffering from breast cancer at the time, read her an admonitory letter and the gist of which was: “from those to whom much is given, much is expected.” Her mother died a few months later, but her advice left an indelible mark on her daughter who now co-chairs the richest philanthropic entity in the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with an endowment in excess of $50 billion.

Born Melinda Ann French on August 15, 1964, in Dallas, Texas, she is the second of four children born to Raymond Joseph French Jr., an aerospace engineer, and Elaine Agnes Amerland, a homemaker. She has an older sister and two younger brothers. As a practising Roman Catholic, she attended St. Monica Catholic School, where she was the top student in her class year before graduating as valedictorian from Ursuline Academy of Dallas in 1982.

Melinda’s interest in computers developed while taking an advanced math class at the Ursuline Academy. This was further enhanced when at 14, her father brought an Apple II, one of the first personal computers available to the general public. She used the PC to play computer games and to learn the Basic programming language.

Her mother, who regretted not having gone to college, placed a strong emphasis on her children’s higher education. So, the family invested in and managed rental properties as a means to pay for the children’s college tuition. Melinda earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics in 1986, followed by an MBA in 1987 at Duke University.

Before graduating, Melinda was interning at IBM in the summer of 1986. She had informed a recruiter that she had an interview with a relatively new company called Microsoft. The recruiter strongly advised Melinda to take the offer “because the chance for advancement there is terrific.” Melinda took her advice and joined Microsoft Corporation in 1987 starting as a product manager, involved primarily in developing multimedia and interactive products.

Over the course of her nine years at Microsoft, Melinda worked her way up to general manager of information products. Some of the projects she was involved with included the budget trip-planning website Expedia, the interactive movie guide Cinemania, the multimedia digital encyclopaedia Encarta, and Microsoft’s Bob, the much derided and shortlived, graphics interface for Windows.

Melinda first met Bill in 1987, four months into her job at Microsoft, when they sat next to each other at an industry trade-fair dinner in New York. “He was funnier than I expected him to be,” Melinda has admitted forthrightly. She found his sense of humour surprising and refreshing given the context of the corporate climate of the times.

Several months later, Bill called her to ask her out on a date saying: “You know, I was thinking maybe we could go out two weeks from tonight,” according to Melinda in a video interview with AOL’s Makers. Her response was less than enthusiastic. She replied: “Two weeks from tonight? I have no idea what I’m doing two weeks from tonight. You aren’t spontaneous enough for me.” The founder of Microsoft was not ready to give up. “He called me about an hour later, and he said: Is this spontaneous enough for you?” He also explained to her that the reason for the long gap in scheduling a date earlier was due to the constant daily flood of meetings. “And I said: Okay, I guess that’s pretty spontaneous. I guess we can try.”

Bill Gates has admitted that the qualities that most attracted him about Melinda were her forthrightness and independence. The pair kept a low-profile at work and asked co-workers and family members to respect their privacy. The couple dated for six years before Bill proposed to Melinda in 1993.

In 1994, Bill and Melinda married in a secret ceremony on the 17th hole of a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, preceded by a firework display and a private performance by Willie Nelson. Melinda’s wedding dress and reception outfit reportedly cost less than $20,000.

During the initial years of her marriage, she took some time to transition from an employee to her new social standing as the wife of one of the wealthiest persons on earth. An even more significant challenge was transforming herself from the girl who cried in her room at the thought of having to give a speech as a valedictorian to one who would be taking on the role of one of the leading philanthropists in the world.

It was during a trip to Africa in 1993 that Melinda and Bill experienced their turning point as far as their philanthropic objectives were concerned. “Late in the dating stages, we talked about the wealth,” Melinda told AOL’s Makers. “It was our first trip to Africa. At the end of that trip, on a beach walk [in Zanzibar], we said, ‘Absolutely, the vast majority of these resources will go back to society.’ We just committed to it. It was just a natural, easy decision for us.”

The next year, Melinda and her husband co-founded the William H. Gates Foundation along with Bill’s father. It was something that William Gates had longed for, and it also followed the example of Bill’s mother, a devoted philanthropist who had died earlier that year. The Foundation pursued health programs across the globe along with projects in their native Pacific Northwest region of the US. The Gates Library Foundation was launched three years later with a focus on bringing Internet technology to public libraries. Next came the Gates Millennium Scholars program in 1999, which directed $1 billion toward minority study grants.

In 1999, the couple combined the three foundations and renamed it the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with a reported endowment of $17 billion and would be spearheaded by Melinda. In 2006, Warren Buffett, a friend of Bill Gates, made a landmark donation of $30 billion to the foundation which amounted to 80 per cent of his multi-billion dollar fortunate. Thanks to Buffett’s pledge, the foundation had become, by far, the world’s largest with its total assets crossing $50 billion.

The foundation’s initial goal was to donate computers and Microsoft products in libraries all over the United States. Over the years, however, Melinda expanded the organisation’s vision to include improving education worldwide, global poverty alleviation and health issues. In anticipation of its growth needs and to divide its assets among the most pressing needs, Melinda then restructured the organisation into three departments: global health, global development, and U.S. community and education.

Through these changes, the foundation can now better focus on its commitment to solving various health problems around the world, with particular emphasis on developing prevention strategies such as controlling insects that transmit diseases, developing vaccines for diseases such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis, and developing superfoods in the fight against malnutrition.

Melinda, along with Bill, “shapes and approves the foundation’s strategies, reviews results, and sets the overall direction of the organisation. Together, they meet with grantees and partners to further the foundation’s goal of improving equity in the United States and around the world,” according to the Foundation’s website.

Warren Buffett, who knows the couple well, described their working relationship to Fortune magazine thus: “[Bill is] smart as hell, obviously...But in terms of seeing the whole picture, [Melinda’s] smarter.”

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) is the top recipient of the foundation which is just over $3.1 billion according to the foundation’s website. It works to save children’s lives and protect people’s health by increasing equitable use of vaccines in lower income countries. In a very close second place is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria at $1.5 billion which provides financial support to country-driven prevention, diagnosis, treatment and education programs working to free the world of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

In third place is the World Health Organization at $1.535 billion. It received grants for a wide range of programs such as Family Health and Nutrition, Emergency Response, Global Libraries, Global Policy & Advocacy, as well as combating Enteric diseases, HIV, Pneumonia, Polio, Tuberculosis and various neglected tropical diseases.

GAVI is also the recipient of the single largest donation ever made by the foundation at just over $1.543 billion in 2016. The second largest, at $1.525 billion, made to the United Negro College Fund’s Scholarships which aims to increase the total annual number of African American college graduates by focusing on activities that ensure more students are collegeready, enrol in college and persist to graduation. The third was a donation of $985 million to the Rotary Foundation to help them fulfil their commitment to fight Polio.

Confronting the burden caused by diseases such as Malaria, STDs including HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, polio and others make up the top four sectors to which the foundation has made donations. They are followed by other health-related issues such as reproductive health care, family planning and nutrition. The other big area of concern is agriculture-related issues such as research, development, resource management and policy and administration.

Micro-finance is another area of concern for the foundation. A total donation of $35.825 million was made to the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) which aims to enhance the capacity of developing and emerging countries to implement innovative financial inclusion policies, with a cross-cutting focus on advancing digital financial services and women’s financial inclusion. A $5 million donation was made to the Financial Access Initiative which conducts field research about microfinance and financial access in impoverished countries. A five-year $3.1 million grant was given to Pro Mujer, a microfinance network in Latin America, as well as a $1.5 million to the Grameen Foundation.

Initially, however, Melinda intended to stay behind the scenes. “I had purposely tried to be behind the scenes, even with the foundation work when the kids were young, because I wanted them to get up and into school, and have that privacy,” she told CNBC Meets. “And I always said that I wouldn’t spend as much time on the foundation until our youngest got into kindergarten; and then when she did, I started spending more and more time on the foundation.”

There was another reason that compelled her to become more of an extrovert. As time passed, she realised that being a woman, she can bring a perspective that’s different than Bill’s. She also realised that she could also be a conduit for the voices of women worldwide. “I can bring these voices forward, and so I started to speak more publicly,” she told CNBC.

Melinda was also instrumental in bringing the issue of family planning to the fore at the foundation. “I was just shocked by how many women were asking me for contraceptives. And so, I realised we needed to do something about it. And I kept, quite honestly, looking for the global champion, I did not want to be the one to take it on — and I couldn’t find that person... I felt like that really needed my voice behind it, because we didn’t have another global champion for it. And then it just grew from there.”

In 2012, Melinda spearheaded the London Summit on Family Planning, which adopted the goal of delivering contraceptives to 120 million women in developing countries by 2020. Her work has led her to increasingly focus on gender equity as a path to meaningful change.

In September 2016, Melinda announced her desire to begin working on the lack of women in technology. She told CNN business: “We’re graduating fewer women technologists. That is not good for society. We have to change it.” She explained that for the next two years she would be in “learning mode” after which she would begin addressing the problem.

To get a sense of Melinda’s passion and commitment to social work, this is what she advised graduating students about hands-on charity work at Stanford in 2014: “Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism.”

For her contributions to humanity, Melinda Gates has accumulated quite a few awards and recognitions over the years. Along with her husband she has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by the then US President Barack Obama; the prestigious Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest national award, from President Francois Hollande in 2017 for their efforts to improve public health and help poor countries; the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honor, in 2015 which is given for contributions made to the state in the field of social work; to name a few.

She has accumulated more than a few accolades of her own. In 2013, she was appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2013 for her services to philanthropy and international development. Then in 2017, for outstanding services to peace and international understanding, she was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal by the United Nations Association of Germany.

She chaired a $300 million fundraising drive for the Seattle Children’s Hospital, donated over $10 million to Ursuline Academy, and co-donated with Bill $210 million in 2000 to set up the Gates Cambridge Trust, which funds postgraduate scholars from outside the UK to study at Cambridge University.

In 2007, Melinda Gates received an honorary doctorate in medicine from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Then in 2013, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Duke University as a tribute for her philanthropic commitment. Between 2011 and 2017, she has been in the in Forbes’ ‘100 Most Powerful Women’ number 3 position thrice, fourth place and sixth place once each.

For Melinda, regardless of all her achievements, her family has always come first. When asked about the legacy she hopes to leave, she said: “On the day I die, I want people to think that I was a great mom and a great family member and a great friend. I care about that more than I care about anything else.”