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GATE Scholarships. Online Digital Library ebooks. New eBook: Banking Placement preparation book. Google eBookstore. Growing up, if I thought my parents were being unfair, I could be pretty harsh with them. When I was at Microsoft, I was tough on people I worked with. So it was inspiring to see these young men in such tough circumstances working on this skill much earlier than I did.
They were deeply engaged in the conversation, asking each other thoughtful follow-up questions. They were facing big challenges with incredible resilience. After the session was over, I stayed around to chat a while. We posed for selfies and joked about the Xbox versus PlayStation debate.
This particular BAM group had been together for a year, and it showed. I was touched by the respect they had for each other and the intimacy they allowed themselves. I left thinking: This is how every classroom in the world should feel. Bill and I love our country. We believe in what it stands for. We agree that our leaders have a duty to protect it. And for all of those reasons, we consider global engagement our patriotic duty.
The reason that countries like the U. Strengthening health systems overseas decreases the chance of a deadly pathogen like Ebola becoming a global epidemic. And ensuring that every parent everywhere has the opportunity to raise safe, educated, healthy kids makes it less likely that they will embark on desperate journeys to seek better lives elsewhere. There is nothing about putting your country first that requires turning your back on the rest of the world. If anything, the opposite is true.
In , governments will need to recommit to funding for the Global Fund, one of the biggest health efforts in the world. And Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, will need to raise money in Since , Gavi has provided basic vaccines to more than million children. To me these results are astonishing. That would be a disaster. Without it, they will die. Even if you only care about the welfare of your fellow citizens, these investments are overwhelmingly smart things to do.
Progress benefits everyone. Last year we organized a toilet fair in Beijing, where I got to check out a number of next-gen toilets in person and even shared the stage with a beaker of human feces.
Several companies are business-ready. So what does the next generation of toilets look like? At first glance, not that different. The real magic happens out of sight. Many of them even turn human feces and urine into useful byproducts, like fertilizer for crops and water for handwashing. They might not be the sexiest innovations in the world, but the toilets of the future will save millions of lives.
Bill and I have both met women who have suffered kidney damage from holding in urine all night to avoid a risky trip to dangerous public facilities. When you learn just how entrenched stigma around periods still is in many places, you can start to understand why someone would rather fall behind on her studies or miss wages than risk humiliation.
But now, thanks to software, the standalone textbook is becoming a thing of the past. All of this is a complement to what teachers do, not a replacement. Your teacher gets a rich report showing what you read and watched, which problems you got right and wrong, and the areas where you need more help. When you come to class the next day, she is equipped with a ton of specific information and suggestions to help her make the most of her time with you.
When I told you about this type of software in previous letters, it was mostly speculative. But now I can report that these tools have been adopted in thousands of U. Zearn, i-Ready, and LearnZillion are examples of digital curricula used by students and teachers throughout the U.
More than 3, schools are teaching a free digital course that I fund called Big History , which uses software to give students immediate feedback on their writing assignments.
The same basic cycle you go through for all software: Get lots of feedback on the existing products, collect data on what works, and make them better. This cycle is picking up steam as more states and districts gain confidence about using digital curricula in their schools.
I hope this growing momentum will inspire more of the big textbook publishers, which have been slow to offer these kinds of tools. In , the typical college student is no longer the stereotypical student who lives in a dorm and graduates in four years after a few spring breaks somewhere warm.
Digital learning tools can help students meet these challenges—by making college more affordable, more convenient, and more effective. Another found that students who used digital learning tools for introductory classes got better grades than students who learned in the traditional way. And, of course, those students had a lot more flexibility.
Not having to show up to a physical classroom at a specific time makes a big difference to students who are balancing school with working and raising a family. Put it all together, and you have students spending less for more convenient classes in which they perform better. In other words, women are not only using their mobile phones to access services and opportunities.
Ketteline Pierre, a high school student in Haiti, texts her friends. The catch is that the gender gap in both mobile phone ownership and mobile internet use remains significant. A recent study of ten countries across Africa, Asia, and South America found that—regardless of their age, education, wealth, or location—women are almost 40 percent less likely than men to have used the internet.
There are a lot of reasons why this gap exists. Cost, literacy both digital and otherwise , and social norms are three of the big ones.
In response, mobile phone companies who are eager to tap into this market are creating business strategies that target women customers. In Kenya and Nigeria, gender and development programs are putting new focus on teaching women digital literacy skills. Her situation became even more untenable after she had to flee an abusive husband. Today, Nikmah is one of more than a million Indonesians making a living through Go-Jek, a popular mobile platform for rides, food deliveries, and other services.
The app connects her to a steady stream of customers and income, and she is paid through a mobile bank account, so she has total control over the money she earns.
She can now afford to provide for her children without having to depend on a man who mistreats her. Discussing the power of mobile technology with women who drive for GO-JEK, a technology platform providing transportation and other on-demand services in Indonesia. We get asked a lot these days whether we're still optimistic about the future.
We say: Absolutely. One reason is that we believe in the power of innovation. But an even bigger reason is that we've seen firsthand that for every challenge we've written about in this letter, there are people devoting their ideas, their resources, and even their lives to solving them. When we're feeling overwhelmed by negative headlines, we remind ourselves that none of us has the right to sit back and expect that the world is going to keep getting better. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to push it in that direction.
In that way, we've found that optimism can be a powerful call to action. And it has a multiplier effect: The more optimists there are working for a better future, the more reasons there are to be optimistic. Log in. Sign up. Log out. My profile and settings. Please complete your account verification. Resend verification email. This verification token has expired.
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Sorry, we were unable to unsubscribe you at this time. Back to profile. Comment Items. View Comment. Saved Posts. Only seven will earn a degree from a four-year-program within six years. It gets worse when you disaggregate by race.
If every student in our classroom is Latinx, only six will finish their four-year degree program within six years. For a classroom of Black students, the number is just four. The fact that progress has been harder to achieve than we hoped is no reason to give up, though. Just the opposite. We believe the risk of not doing everything we can to help students reach their full potential is much, much greater.
We certainly understand why many people are skeptical about the idea of billionaire philanthropists designing classroom innovations or setting education policy. Frankly, we are, too. Are charter schools good or bad? Should the school day be shorter or longer? Is this lesson plan for fractions better than that one? Getting a child through high school requires at least 13 years of instruction enabled by hundreds of teachers, administrators, and local, state, and national policymakers.
The process is so cumulative that changing the ultimate outcome requires intervention at many different stages. Even so, we have seen some signs of progress. Bill goes into even more reasons to be optimistic below. Although these scholarships made a huge difference in the lives of those 20, students, the reality is that tens of millions of other students passed through U. That means we reached only a tiny percentage of them. Our goal is to help make a huge difference for all U.
And it reinforces our commitment to supporting a public-school system that will ensure every student has the same opportunity they did. We bet big on a set of standards called the Common Core. Nearly every state adopted them within two years of their release. We thought that if states raised the standards the market would respond and develop new instructional materials that aligned with those standards.
After teachers told us they had no way of knowing whether a textbook met the new standards, our foundation backed a nonprofit organization called EdReports , which acts like a Consumer Reports for instructional materials.
Now, any teacher can look up a textbook to see if it is high-quality and aligned with the standards. Schools have started purchasing more of the materials that best serve their students based on these reviews—and manufacturers, in turn, have begun creating more and better textbook options. Beyond textbooks, we knew we needed to find other ways to better support teachers and students. So, we looked for ways to provide more training and help them adjust their practice.
Much of our early work in education seemed to hit a ceiling. Once projects expanded to reach hundreds of thousands of students, we stopped seeing the results we hoped for. Our work needed to be tailored to the specific needs of teachers and students in the places we were trying to reach. Our hope is that these Networks for School Improvement will increase the number of Black, Latinx, and low-income students who graduate from high school and pursue postsecondary opportunities.
Many, but not all, are grouped by region. The first year of high school is a critical moment. A freshman who fails no more than one course is four times more likely to graduate than one who fails two or more.
The school serves students from neighborhoods that struggle with violence, hunger, and other challenges. It used to be ranked among the worst schools in the city. Armed with data and lessons learned from the other schools in the network, the school changed the way it serves its ninth graders.
An online portal lets you check your grades every day. Last year, 95 percent of North-Grand freshmen were on track for graduation—and the school was ranked one of the best in the city.
Many of the other schools in the network have adopted similar programs and experienced similar progress. Rather than focus on one-size-fits-all solutions, our foundation wants to create opportunities for schools to learn from each other.
One of the things I noticed on many of those trips was how little electricity there was. After the sun set, entire villages plunged into darkness. I remember seeing unlit streets in Lagos where people huddled around fires they had built in old oil barrels.
I also remember thinking we should do something about this. Our modern world is built on electricity. Without it, you are quite literally left in the dark. So, I started talking to experts about the issue and what could be done.
Two facts quickly became clear. First, the world would become a richer, healthier, and more equitable place if everyone had reliable access to electricity. Second, we need to find a way to make that happen without contributing to climate change. That was nearly 14 years ago. When Warren urged Melinda and me to swing for the fences all those years ago, he was talking about the areas our foundation worked on at the time, not climate change.
But his advice applies here, too. The good news is that we already have the ambition to get things done and goals to work toward. As for the goals, we can thank the Paris Agreement and all of the countries, cities, and states that have made bold commitments to zero out emissions by So, what should the plan to meet that zero-emission goal look like? But the short version breaks down into two buckets: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is all about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The key to making that happen is a combination of deploying the things that work now and lots of innovation to create and scale the technologies we still need.
When people talk about solving climate change, they usually focus on reducing emissions—which is a good thing! But solving climate change will require more than just mitigation.
We also need to take on adaptation. People all over the world are already being affected by a warmer world. Those impacts will only get worse in the years to come. No one will be hit harder than subsistence farmers, who rely on the food they grow to feed their families and already live on the edge of survival. In areas with severe droughts, the growing season could get cut even shorter.
The result will be less food, for both the farmers themselves and others who rely on the crops they grow and sell. More kids will suffer from malnutrition, and the already enormous inequity between the rich and poor will get even worse.
Over a decade ago, we began funding research into drought- and flood-tolerant varieties of staple crops like maize and rice. These new varieties are already helping farmers grow more food in some parts of Africa and India, and more climate-smart crop options will become available in more places in the years to come. But even if we succeed in increasing crop yields, the reality is that climate change will make it harder for many people to get the nutrition they need—which will, in turn, make them more susceptible to disease.
We need to reduce the number of children who become malnourished and improve the odds that people who do suffer from malnutrition survive. That means making sure that people have access not only to the nutrients they need but also to proven interventions like vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics.
Organizations like Gavi and the Global Fund are going to play a big role in this by improving health in the most vulnerable places. We need to be thinking about the indirect effects, too, like how a warmer planet will affect global health. Climate change is one of the most difficult challenges the world has ever taken on. But I believe we can avoid a climate catastrophe if we take steps now to reduce emissions and find ways to adapt to a warmer world.
I remember reading about the conference and feeling that the world had planted an important stake in the ground for women. But it took years before I recognized how gender equality would fit into my own work. I wrote a lot about those trips in my book, The Moment of Lift , because they changed everything for me. I met sex workers in Thailand who helped me understand that if I had been born in their place, I, too, would do whatever it took to feed my family.
I met a community health volunteer in Ethiopia who told me she once spent the night in a hole in the ground rather than returning to her abusive husband—when she was 10 years old.
Each one of these women represents millions more. And what makes their stories even harder to bear is the knowledge that, unless we take action, they are stories that are destined to repeat themselves.
The data is unequivocal: No matter where in the world you are born, your life will be harder if you are born a girl. In developing countries, the experiences of boys and girls start dramatically diverging in adolescence.
The average girl in sub-Saharan Africa ends her education with two fewer years of schooling than the average boy. One in five girls is married before her 18th birthday, trapping her on the wrong side of a power imbalance even within her own home. Meanwhile, in high-income countries, gender inequality tends to be most visible in the workplace.
Even though women in the U. Men are 70 percent more likely to be executives than women of the same age. These numbers are even worse for women of color, who are doubly marginalized by the combined forces of sexism and racism.
The reason the pace of progress for women and girls has been so glacial is no mystery. Global leaders simply have not yet made the political and financial commitments necessary to drive real change. When the world comes together to mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Conference at the Generation Equality Forum later this year, it will, I hope, do a lot to generate energy and attention around gender equality.
But this time, we need to ensure that our energy and attention are converted into action. If we miss another opportunity, if we let the spotlight sputter out again, we risk contributing to a dangerous narrative that inequality between men and women is inevitable. To make this time different, we need to make bold attempts at new solutions that will dismantle inequality by pulling three levers simultaneously.
First is fast-tracking women in leadership positions in critical sectors like government, technology, finance, and health. When more women have a voice in the rooms where decisions are made, more of those decisions will benefit all of us.
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