One of the most gratifying parts of my job as CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is watching the successes we achieve year by year add up to our big 10- and 20-year goals. The ritual of putting together the annual report helps me reflect on how impact accumulates over time.
In 2005, for example, we wrote about the recent phase I trials for a new vaccine for meningitis, one of the most dreaded diseases in the world. In 2010, the vaccine was introduced in three countries in Africa’s Meningitis Belt. Over the next decade, we believe this vaccine will protect tens of millions of children from meningitis epidemics.
The Meningitis Vaccine Project reinforced an important lesson: Our grantees and partners are at the core of everything we do. We didn’t research and develop—or deliver—the new meningitis vaccine; that work was done by a vast public-private partnership, including an American governmental agency, a Dutch biotech company, and an Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer, not to mention dozens of African governments. We are effective only when we are working together with partners to achieve the objectives we share.
Strengthening Grantee Partnerships
That’s why, two years ago, we asked the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to survey our grantees. There were some positive results, and you can read the details here, but the key takeaway was that we have some work to do to build more productive grantee relationships. Many grantees said we are inconsistent and unclear about our decision-making process and our programmatic strategies. They also said we should be more welcoming of their feedback.
Of course, our job is not to score well on surveys. Our job is to get results. But we know that our results depend on the quality of our partnerships, and it was clear from the survey results that we can achieve greater impact by forging stronger relationships with our most important partners—our grantees.
I chose Greg Shaw, an experienced member of my leadership team, to spearhead the development of an improvement plan. (Greg gives some additional detail here.) He recruited a diverse group of employees to advise him. It was absolutely essential that this be a foundation-wide effort, and I’m pleased to say that it has been.
The team spent almost a year analyzing the survey results and getting additional input. We are currently creating a set of principles about clear communication and high-quality interactions. The goal is to be concrete about what we expect of ourselves and what our grantees can expect from us. The essence of the commitment we’re making to our partners is that we will continue to seek and respond to their feedback. As this letter goes to press we are finalizing plans and timelines, and I look forward to sharing more this fall when I host a series of conference calls with our grantee partners.
When I wrote my first CEO letter three years ago, I talked about how feedback loops in philanthropy differ from those in the private sector. The issue of feedback is still at the top of my mind.
When we devise strategies or grants, there must be a formal way to incorporate the voice of our grantees in the process. It doesn’t mean we follow every piece of advice our grantees give us, but it does mean we make a systematic effort to listen, with the aim of maximizing our mutual impact. We also have to include the voice of grantees when we evaluate our individual performance, which is why we will continue to seek out grantee feedback as part of the annual performance review for foundation employees.
Some of our peer foundations, including the Packard and Wallace Foundations, have improved their scores on the CEP survey significantly. It will take time, but I believe we will make similar progress. We won’t settle for less.
Refining Our Programmatic Strategies
One of the things our partners say they want most is clear communication about how we make decisions. In that spirit, I’d like to talk about how we recently refined our agricultural development strategy. You can find more information about the strategy here. What I want to share is the process by which the agriculture team arrived at it. All our teams go through this process, and I think it provides some insight into how we work.
At the foundation, we have 26 strategies, each reviewed annually by Bill, Melinda, and me. These reviews give us the chance to make adjustments based on what’s happening on the ground and what we’ve learned. Every three to five years, we look at each strategy more thoroughly. We call this a strategy refresh.
Our agricultural development team recently completed a refresh of its strategy. The goal of increasing agricultural productivity and reducing poverty among poor farming families in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia remains at the core of our work. Three quarters of the poorest people in the world get their food and income from farming small plots of land. Helping these families grow more food is the smartest way to fight hunger and poverty, and that’s the lens through which we look at all our decisions.
The refresh gave us a great opportunity to examine our impact after five years of working in the field. It was especially inspiring to reflect on the momentum that’s been building around the issue of agriculture in general, as more donors, aid agencies, and developing countries, particularly in Africa, have focused on its importance as a key lever of development.
Over the course of a year, the team sought guidance from hundreds of people: grantees, other partners, experts in the field, and small farmers themselves. We shared our thinking and asked for advice.
Ultimately, we concluded that we need to tighten our focus. We are zeroing in on the crops and livestock that are most important to the poor, and we’re concentrating on the key constraints that keep productivity low. We’re also deepening our engagement in regions where a majority of the world’s poorest farmers live.
The strategy process is an extremely important part of the work we do. No organization wants to spend resources without a master plan, and together, the strategies make up our master plan. Regularly reviewing our strategies is also our best chance to apply the lessons learned from our past work. I like to say that even if our grants don’t fully succeed, we fail only if we don’t learn. At the foundation, some of our best learning happens through this very comprehensive strategy process.
While communicating clearly is one important aspect of improving our relationship with grantees, we are also committed to giving our partners a chance to communicate with us. If you have input about what more we could be doing to strengthen grantee partnerships, please email us at granteesurvey@gatesfoundation.org. I will also continue seeking out input from our grantees. Last year, I started having conference calls with grantees. I’ll have another series of them in the fall. Finally, I encourage you to visit our new blog, Impatient Optimists. I’m excited about how it will help us tell our story and hope it can create a community of people having a conversation about the issues.
In the meantime, I will continue to report back to you about how we’re progressing in our work to strengthen grantee partnerships. It’s one of my top priorities as CEO.
Together with our grantees and partners, we are working to solve some of the world’s toughest problems. How to deliver vaccines to the most remote places in the world. How to make sure that every child in the United States has an effective teacher and that all teachers have the support they need to be as effective as possible. These are not easy tasks. But as long as we consistently build productive partnerships, there is no limit to the impact we can have together.
Jeff Raikes
CEO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation