Review of The Moment of Lift

Uplifting Women

After a successful career at Microsoft, Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, chose to spend years as a stay-at-home mother. As her children grew, she also devoted more time and energy to the couple’s philanthropic efforts through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates details how the Foundation seeks to solve unaddressed problems and to find opportunities where small investments can leverage transformation. She explains how her and her husband’s education as philanthropists began in Africa when they learned that children were dying by the tens of thousands because their families had no access to – and, often, no knowledge of – low-cost medical interventions that could save their lives. The Foundation invested in vaccines to promote global health. The Gates’s learned that poverty and disease fuel one another. “The primary causes of poverty and illness,” Melinda Gates writers, “are the cultural, financial and legal restrictions that block what women can do – and think they can do – for themselves and their children.”