Gates' Foundation critique

Raikes, who worked in Bill Gates' inner circle at Microsoft for 27 years, is often described by colleagues as a "great listener."
But that's not always the description used for the Gates Foundation, the world's biggest philanthropic organization, with an endowment of $35 billion — about three times more than the second-biggest in the U.S., the Ford Foundation. Last year, the Gates Foundation gave away $3 billion. That's an amount on par with the individual gross domestic product that year of almost three dozen countries, including Togo and Swaziland.
Instead, the Gates Foundation has been painted by critics and even admirers as sometimes too heavy-handed in saying how its money is used and too prone to listening to the recommendations of experts vs. grass-roots groups when setting its strategies to battle global poverty. "There's concern that their programs are too top down and they don't listen to the grass roots," says Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. The institute, which is part of Georgetown University, focuses on research and an array of public policy issues.
Raikes, now 20 months into the CEO job, says he's working to improve communication between the foundation and the more than 1,000 grantees it funds worldwide. But Raikes also defends the Gates Foundation's history of setting goals for grantees and for holding them accountable. "In order to succeed ... you have to put a stake in the ground," Raikes says. "But it's extremely i
important that we be listening ... even if viewpoints are not the same as ours."
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2010-06-02-gatesfoundation02_CV_N.htm