The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just issued a statement regarding Dr. Rajiv Shah, President Obama’s selection to be the next USAID Administrator. You can read ONE’s take on the pick here.

Gates Foundation statement:

The selection of Dr. Rajiv Shah as the next administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) demonstrates a commitment to providing strong, evidence-based, effective U.S. foreign assistance. We have worked closely with Raj for several years and know he will bring the same commitment, intelligence and visionary management style to USAID.

Raj was an important part of the foundation’s leadership and played a key role in our efforts on global health and agricultural development. In global health, he worked to promote the development and distribution of vaccines, which are the most cost-effective public health investments we can make. He also helped develop and implement a strategy aimed at breaking the cycle of hunger and poverty by providing small farmers in the developing world with the tools and opportunities to boost productivity, and build better lives for themselves and their families. We are confident that he will bring the same rigor, innovation and belief in the transformative power of foreign assistance and sustainable development to USAID, and we look forward to working with him.

Rotary International is teaming up with violin virtuoso and polio survivor Itzhak Perlman and the world-renowned New York Philharmonic to present the Concert to End Polio, a benefit performance supporting the global effort to eradicate this disabling and sometimes fatal childhood disease.

Polio eradication resonates strongly with Mr. Perlman, who contracted the disease at age four and overcame serious physical challenges to become one of the world’s most celebrated musicians. Mr. Perlman is a winner of 15 Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. In this historic, one-night-only performance Perlman will help Rotary in its effort to raise $200 million to match a $355 million challenge grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All of the money raised will fund critical eradication activities in countries where polio still threatens children.

Rotary International, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an initiative to make polio only the second disease to be eradicated. At the time (1988), there were 350,000 polio cases a year. Last year, there were less than 2,000. Worldwide, the number of polio cases has been slashed by 99 percent, preventing five million cases of childhood paralysis and 250,000 deaths. However, the final one percent of cases is the most difficult and expensive to prevent.

The one-night-only performance will be held on 2 December at 7:30 p.m. in New York City.
Learn how you can help at rotary.org/endpolio or purchase tickets for this historic event at nyphil.org/perlman.

-Petina Dixon, Rotary International

If you watched Bill and Melinda Gates’ “Impatient Optimists” presentation, you probably remember this discussion about rotavirus, and the deadly impact it can have on children:

The Living Proof Project also has this great corresponding photo gallery documenting clinics in Managua and Pantasma, Nicaragua where great progress is being made in the administering of rotavirus vaccines.

You can check out the full gallery by clicking the image below:

As part of the Living Proof Project, which we’ve covered extensively here on the ONE Blog, the Gates Foundation has posted this photo gallery following women at the Osu Maternity Home in Accra, Ghana. It’s part of a larger discussion about the benefits and techniques of breastfeeding, which were also examined in this infographic.

Anyone who tuned in for Bill and Melinda Gates’ “Impatient Optimists” presentation on Tuesday got to see a very special performance courtesy of Vocal Motion 6, an a cappella group from Namibia who use their talent to educate young Namibians about HIV prevention.

Music is a particularly powerful way to reach a wide audience and hold peoples’ attention, so it’s great to see Vocal Motion 6 utilizing their talents– which are immense, as I can attest to– in this way.

The Living Proof Project chronicles their “Living Positive Tour” in this photo gallery. Click the image below to see for yourself:

Coming off their Living Proof Presentation last night in DC, Bill and Melinda Gates were featured on NPR this morning to go a little more in depth about US investment in global health. It’s a nice follow-up piece to last night’s event.

You can check out the audio below, and the story here.

I just returned from Sidney Harman Hall here in Washington, DC where Bill and Melinda Gates presented the Living Proof Project.

A lot of you watched the speech live here on the ONE Blog so I won’t rehash the event detail for detail, but what I saw tonight was probably one of the most compelling and crystal clear cases for US investments in global health I’ve ever witnessed. Smallpox eradicated, polio reduced 99 percent, measles reduced 93 percent, terrific progress made in the fight against HIV/AIDS and malaria– it was truly inspiring to see these facts laid out by two people who are playing such a pivotal role in encouraging the US government to do more.

But with so much to be optimistic about, Melinda Gates probably put it best when she said “the world is getting better. But it’s not getting better for everyone, and it’s not getting better fast enough.”

The presentation was interspersed with some fantastic footage chronicling US global health investments on the ground. It’s no secret that video is often the best medium to really capture some of these powerful stories, and the crowd’s reaction definitely demonstrated that.

I just have to share this one that documents the results of Rotavirus vaccine in a clinic in Nicaragua. Even though I’d seen it before, I still find it really striking.

The Gates cited several specific examples of programs that are making great strides in global health– from the Global Fund and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, to the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the promise of the Millennium Development Goals.

It was fitting that the Gates chose to make this presentation in DC given the importance they placed in the US Government’s ability to make an enormous impact. As Bill Gates put it, though foundations like the Gates Foundation can act as catalysts, governments in rich countries “have the money, the expertise, and the leadership to deliver the interventions that will save millions of lives.”

There’s a lot more I could add, but I’ll choose instead to end it the same way the Gates did tonight– by pointing you to www.livingproofproject.org so you can see for yourself what I saw tonight and spread the word in your community about all the great work that’s being done thanks to US investments in global health– and how much is still left to do.

You can watch the presentation in its entirety in the below blog post.

This morning we were honored to publish a guest blog post from Melinda Gates who, along with her husband Bill Gates, will be speaking in Washington, DC tomorrow night about the Living Proof Project.

If you don’t live in DC, no worries! We’ll be hosting a live webcast of the presentation here on ONE.org. Be sure to RSVP here, and invite your friends as well. The presentation will begin at approximately 7:00 PM EST and will highlight the millions of lives have been saved, improved and empowered because of the investments in global health.

See you then!

A special guest post from Melinda Gates:

This week, I’m in Washington with Bill to do something that might seem unusual: say ‘thank you.’ We’re saying thanks to those who have been a part of the U.S. government’s tremendous leadership in improving global health. Our trip will include the launch of a new effort called “Living Proof Project: U.S. Investments in Global Health are Working,” a campaign aimed at conveying to Americans the tremendous progress we are making on multiple fronts in the effort to improve health around the world. Our hope is that if more people see this impact they will be moved to share these compelling stories and support America’s continued leadership in global health.

I know that for Bill and for me, these stories have had a profound impact on the way we look at the opportunities in the years ahead. At our foundation, we have come to believe that sharing stories of success is one of the most important things we can do to motivate and inspire others. Through our work, especially our visits to the field, we have been deeply touched by personal stories of lives changed for the better.

When I visited Ethiopia earlier this year, I met Tsion, a hard-working young Health Extension Worker stationed at the Wuye Gosee community health post in North West Shewa, Oromiya Region – about 3 hours drive north of Addis Ababa. She lives at the health post, in one of the rooms where she sees patients. When she’s not working at the health post, Tsion is visiting other outreach clinics and homes in the area. She and another Health Extension Worker cover a massive caseload of about 1,500 households. They walk more than two hours to reach some of the homes.

One of their most important responsibilities is tending to pregnant mothers and newborns. In Ethiopia, most families choose to deliver their babies at home with the help of traditional birth attendants. These traditional attendants lack important skills like stopping internal bleeding after delivery or resuscitating newborns if they’ve stopped breathing. Now the Ethiopian government has started a Health Extension Program that is rapidly improving access to health care in rural areas. In the past five years, more than 30,000 Health Extension Workers have been trained — and the health of children and women is improving.

The Health Extension Program is a great starting point: an opportunity to deliver safe, effective care for many more women and their newborns. Now we need to build on this success—expanding it to even more women in Ethiopia, and helping families in other countries benefit from what Ethiopia has learned. For millions of women in poor countries, the birth of a child isn’t the pure joy that it should be. It is joy mixed with terror, because there’s a real possibility that the mother or her child will not survive.

That’s why, when it comes to global health, Bill and I are optimists – but we’re impatient optimists.

We’re optimistic because, when we travel around the world, we constantly meet people like Tsion and her patients whose lives have been transformed through smart, generous investments in global health. We have seen living proof that U.S. investments in global health are working. Millions of lives are being saved. Tremendous progress is being made. But there’s still so much more we’re impatient to see done.

When you only hear about the problems in global health, they can seem very daunting. But if you see the amazing progress that’s being made — in part due to the generosity of the U.S. government and other donor nations – I know you’ll be as hopeful as I am. And you’ll want to do more.

Look at what U.S. support has helped accomplish:

• The number of children under 5 who die each year has plunged from more than 20 million in 1960 to fewer than 9 million in 2008
• Vaccines are a great investment with a huge pay-off: since 1980, vaccines have brought down the number of diphtheria cases by 93 percent; tetanus by 85 percent; and measles by nearly 93 percent
• 32 million people received life-saving malaria prevention and treatment services in 2008

The United States and its partners around the world have the potential to save and empower millions more people. Bill and I hope to share these stories of success on October 27, through a live presentation titled “Living Proof: Why we are Impatient Optimists,” which will show how U.S. investments in global health are changing the world.

-Melinda French Gates

Along with the great infographics we’ve been writing about on the ONE Blog, the Living Proof Project has also produced some great photo essays. Each one tells a story and really illustrates the topic in ways words alone often can’t.

This gallery I thought was particularly striking. It follows Kevin who is HIV-positive and works at a health center in Dimbokro, Cote d’Ivoire.

Check it out by clicking the image below: