Gates CEO Hopes Fund’s Evaluation Tools Will Help Other Grant Makers

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can make an impact on all grant making not just with its money but in helping establish ways to evaluate the effectiveness of large-scale awards, the foundation’s chief executive Jeff Raikes tells The Washington Post in the newspaper’s special section of giving-related articles.

The $36-billion foundation is “doing a lot of work coming up with feedback loops as proxies for market forces that will tell us how to refine our strategies and speed up progress,” Mr. Raikes said. He said the foundation is working with many other organizations to develop a system of “actionable measurement.”

In other articles, the Post asks Warren Buffett, the Kennedy Center chairman David Rubenstein, and other wealthy donors about their giving strategies; and Ezra Klein, an economics blogger, writes about the political dimension of giving and the potential “force multiplier” of supporting groups that seek to influence public policies that cause social problems.