Senior fellow Charles Kenny's interview with Bill and Melinda Gates was featured in Foreign Policy.
From the Interview
Bill Gates on what's lacking in development:
The greatest market failure is the lack of investment in innovation, particularly innovation that would be of particular value to the poorest. We've been big on funding disease and agricultural innovations; why governments tend to fund delivery more than they fund upstream innovation, I don't know. In delivery systems, it wouldn't be typical for us to take on that kind of funding other than in pilot mode because when you're talking about delivering incentive payments to an entire country, it's not something that philanthropic means are going to be able to have the scale to do. But a lot of our inventiveness is on how upstream [innovation] and downstream [delivery] work together. So you take the polio campaign: using satellite maps to update the microplans that the vaccinators follow, using the GPS tracker to follow along to see if the independent monitoring person actually goes and visits the houses that they say they're visiting so that your tracking data is good. I don't think a lot of what we're doing with polio deserves a pure classification of upstream or downstream.
On working with governments on aid:
Within our areas of expertise, which include health and agriculture, some financial services, water, and sanitation, we are willing to really celebrate the great successes where rich-country aid budgets are funding things that are quite successful. We spend over $3 billion a year, of which $2 billion gets spent outside the United States, on these issues of helping the poorest countries. Getting the word out there -- [so] that people know that when the U.S is spending on malaria bed nets it's making a difference; or when Europe is funding new agricultural things, that that's worked out; or The Global Fund or GAVI Alliance are doing great work -- we spent quite a bit of time on that. Certainly at this G20 meeting [in November] we are encouraging rich countries and middle-income countries to spend their aid well and not to reduce their generosity lower than the minimum necessary.