Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

These patterns persist in the more densely populated donor categories, tech and private equity, multibillionaires and dynastic wealth, great foundations and the biggest of big corporations.

Eric Schmidt and Sean Parker are there as are Microsoft and the Gates Foundation.

Ken Griffin, a financier who supports conservative causes, shows up in the 1 to 99, to 9.9 million dollar category along with the personal foundation of the walmart heiress allison watts walton and the walmart foundation itself there's a robust contingent from the philanthropy world and a number of athletes and celebrities and a generous sampling of names from the fortune 500 Had this presidential center been constructed 30 years ago, Donald Trump himself would probably have been on board if it had been constructed 30 years ago.

What unites all these oligarchs and dynasts, all these monopolists and employers of lobbyists, is their interest in advancing a very particular interpretation of history.

Cape Talk is your thinking space for stories that matter moments that move and voices that stay with you we talk about this city the country and the world Cape Talk join the conversation

we are talking to Francesca de Gasparis Executive Director of the Southern African Faith Communities Environmental Institute joining us in the studio and essentially 612 25 I get that right African faith leaders have signed an open letter to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demanding reparations and an immediate shift away from industrial agricultural interventions across the continent.

We want to understand what the case against the support for the Alliance for Green, a green revolution in Africa is.

What is that case?

hundreds of billions of dollars into this practice, this approach.

And so that's why we went.

I actually wrote directly to Mark Sussman, who's South African, but he's also the CEO of the Gates Foundation.

And he wrote me a nice note back this week just before a press conference yesterday.

Exactly, exactly.

So Botswana's approach was the government worked with international partners, including the African Comprehensive HIV-AIDS Partnership, supported by organisations that we know, such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical company Merck.

Yeah, we've talked about them before, haven't we? So together, they helped expand the infrastructure needed to deliver HIV treatment.

And over time, treatment services were extended beyond major hospitals into healthcare facilities all across the country.

And that is simultaneously like a really exciting thing.

If you think about like the history of like the American project, it has been shaped many times over by not just kind of the state, but also by kind of like large waves of philanthropic capital, whether it was the Rockefellers or the Carnegie's or, you know, the Gates Foundation or any number of other kind of like actors.

Yeah.

And on the flip side, each of those forms of capital has their own set of biases.

What are some other topics that are going to be addressed? Climate change, of course.

Who's involved in this? The Gates Foundation, of course.

What are some of the buzzwords used? The spiritual unification of the world.

They're trying to counter that.

But the figures today... operate very differently either they don't give any money to philanthropy as in the case of elon musk right their embodiment of capitalist ideology is complete in some sense and they simply are operating by uh generating as much wealth for themselves as possible but but then you have a different class of people in the kind of mold of people like bill gates for example who have spent enormous money on philanthropic efforts But those efforts are much more calculated and ideological than the efforts of people like Andrew Carnegie.

So the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now the Gates Foundation, is...

I can't claim to have done research on this thing, but it is engaged certainly in a number of causes and has...

some figures who would say nice things about it for its work with malaria and sub-Saharan Africa, but it is also an engine of propelling a certain capitalist ideology.

She sure does.

You know, Bill Gates has continued directing significant resources toward global health initiatives through the Gates Foundation.

And that's a big deal to me, especially being that he focuses on eradicating cancer and Because my mom died of breast cancer.

So that's a huge deal to me.

And you also mentioned how this will only get worse as foundations tailor their giving to the ideological constraints of the far right.

Witness the Gates Foundation's unceremonious dumping of the left-leaning Arabella Advisors Network of nonprofit organizations in 2025.

So is philanthropy left in the hands of foundations not only bad for the environment, not only bad for nature, but does it empower the far right? And if so, why?

Ah.