The World's 50 Greatest Leaders

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Bill and Melinda Gates

WGL05.19-Bill Melinda Gates
In Manhiça, Mozambique in 2003. “Melinda would sit on the ground, talking woman to woman about the things that mothers care about,” recalls one ally who joined the trip. “She has this remarkable ability to connect.” Courtesy of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/Barbara KinneyCourtesy of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/Barbara Kinney
  • Title
    Cofounders
  • Affiliation
    Gates Foundation

For evidence of what happens when an unstoppable force — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — meets a profoundly movable human being, the empathetic Melinda Gates, one has simply to measure the impact of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.   From January 1995 through the end of 2017, that namesake philanthropy (along with earlier Gates family foundations that were merged into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000) has deployed an extraordinary, barely countable $45.5 billion. That funding has launched, and then continually supported, what global health experts widely acknowledge to be some of the most successful international, private-public partnerships ever formed: GAVI, which has helped developing countries immunize 700 million children against preventable diseases. The second is The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.   But the impact of Bill and Melinda Gates is due to more than money. As Warren Buffett told Fortune, “The two of them have a multiplier effect—the two of them together. They act with a unity of purpose and with a difference of style.”   Read Fortune's profile of Bill and Melinda Gates here.