Humanosphere

Earlier this week, Bill and Melinda Gates held an event in collaboration with the ONE campaign called Living Proof in London.

I wrote about that event and also about the ONE campaign abruptly shutting off the ability for people to submit questions to the Gateses — just after I posted a reminder to folks that this event was coming up and (half-jokingly) suggested people ask about ONE’s finances.

I assumed them shutting off the ability for people to ask questions just after my post was a coincidence, but I asked ONE for an explanation.

Just FIVE days later, the ONE campaign’s David Cole responded:

“We received an amazing response from ONE members around the world to our request for questions to Bill and Melinda Gates, with questions submitted from all corners of the globe, including the United States.”

Cole said the ONE campaign folks were so busy with the London event they just couldn’t get back to me sooner. He said they shut down submissions last week in order to sift through all the questions, which you can see on a scrolling display at their website.

But if you actually sit through and watch the questions,they repeat after a fairly short time period — making me wonder how many questions they actually got. I heard that despite ONE’s two million members and the significant publicity advertising the Living Proof event, only about 400 people watched the webcast.

Maybe that’s what Cole meant by “amazing.”

The ONE campaign gets most of its money from the Gates Foundation and spends most of it on salaries, doing advocacy work. It looks to be a well-intended and wonderfully motivated group of people. But some people have questions about how the money gets spent — and whether it is being spent well. Somebody probably needs to come up with a metric for advocacy effectiveness.

I hope people did tune into the Living Proof event because it was actually a pretty good overview by the Gateses on the progress being made, and the wisdom of wealthy nations in supporting foreign development. You can always watch it again, of course, on the web.

And Bill and Melinda’s trip to London to this event was not just to do the ONE event. As The Economist’s Matthew Bishop notes in his take on Living Proof, the Gateses also came to Britain to work the corridors of power and ask that the new conservative government stay true to its strong support for foreign aid.