NEW YORK (AP) — The $42 billion Gates Foundation says the lives of poor people around the world will improve more over the next 15 years "than at any time in history." 
 
 Bill and Melinda Gates are interviewed in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger, the $42 billion... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Gates talks during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger, the $42 billion... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill and Melinda Gates are interviewed in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger, the $42 billion... (Associated Press) 
 
 Melinda Gates listens during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger, the $42... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Gates listens during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger, the $42 billion... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Gates listens while his wife Melinda Gates talks during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Melinda Gates listens while her husband Bill Gates talks during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Gates talks during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger, the $42 billion... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Gates listens to his wife Melinda Gates during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease... (Associated Press) 
 
 Melinda Gates listens while her husband Bill Gates talks during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill Gates listens while his wife Melinda Gates talks during an interview in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2015. As the world decides on the most crucial goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Bill and Melinda Gates in an interview laid out the vision for the world's largest charitable foundation as they prepared to travel to the World Economic Forum and its annual networking meeting of heads of state and business leaders. 
 
 The international community, led by the United Nations, is deciding this year on the most crucial development goals for the next 15 years in defeating poverty, disease and hunger. 
 
 The Gates Foundation's own ambitious 15-year agenda, spelled out in its latest annual letter, foresees the elimination of polio and three other diseases and says Africa will be able to feed itself. 
 
 But climate change, an increasingly alarming global issue, is only briefly addressed, though the U.N. secretary-general has warned that this is the last generation that can do anything to avoid its worst effects. The foundation's letter calls "right now" for the development of cheaper, zero-carbon-emissions energy sources. 
 
 The Gates Foundation's annual letter was published online early Thursday. It looks ahead to a world where polio and Guinea worm, along with at least two others, will be eliminated. 
 
 It will be a "much better eradication track record in these 15 years than in all of human history," Bill Gates said in the interview Wednesday. 
 
 Polio could be the first to go. Africa hasn't had a case in the past six months, and with most of the cases recorded in Pakistan last year, the government there is stepping up, "knowing they're last, the spotlight's on them," Gates said. 
 
 It takes three years of no documented cases to certify that a disease has been eradicated, so the earliest that polio will be declared over is 2018. 
 
 "It'll be 2018 or within one or two years of that," Gates said. 
 
 The foundation has been assertive in the fight to end malaria as well, but that won't be achieved in the next 15 years, he said. 
 
 Melinda Gates spoke out strongly about another goal, cutting in half the number of deaths for children under 5. It was achieved between 1990 and now, and doing it again would bring the death rate to one child in 40 over the next decade and a half. 
 
 "Sometimes these things don't make the headlines, but they should," she said. 
 
 The couple said they plan to meet with World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan in at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The foundation last year announced it would spend $50 million on the emergency response to Ebola in West Africa, where both WHO and Chan have been criticized for their handling of the worst outbreak of the disease in history. More than 8,000 people have died. 
 
 "I think the biggest lesson coming out of the Ebola outbreak is we need to invest in primary health care centers, those little health posts that the people come in and they're referred up in the system," Melinda Gates said. "Had those been functioning and working better in West Africa, the disease would have been contained much more quickly." ||||| Do you think the goals outlined by Bill and Melinda Gates over the next 15 years are achievable? Share your thoughts 
 
 Bill and Melinda Gates have outlined their vision for the world over the next 15 years, predicting that the lives of the people in the poorest countries will improve faster than at any other time in history. 
 
 The Gates foundation’s seventh annual letter includes several “big bets” from the philanthropists on what they predict will be the big breakthroughs in global health, education and agriculture. 
 
 The letter states this year’s bets were inspired by the prediction Bill Gates and his Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, made 40 years ago, that personal computers and software would transform people’s lives. 
 
 “Some people thought they were nuts. But the bet turned out well,” said the letter. “Fifteen years ago, the two of us made a similar bet. We started our foundation in 2000 with the idea that by backing innovative work in health and education, we could help dramatically reduce inequity. The progress we’ve seen so far is very exciting – so exciting that we are doubling down on the bet we made 15 years ago and picking ambitious goals for what’s possible 15 years from now.” 
 
 
 
 The Gates Foundation predicts the following breakthroughs in the next 15 years: 
 
 Child deaths will reduce by half, and more diseases will be eradicated than ever before. 
 
 Diseases such as polio, guinea worm, elephantiasis and blinding trachoma will be eradicated. 
 
 
 
 The world will have a vaccine to prevent people with malaria from spreading it to the mosquitoes that bite them, a single-dose cure that clears the parasite completely out of a person’s body, and a diagnostic test to show whether a person is infected with malaria. 
 
 Agricultural productivity will increase by 50% across Africa, allowing farmers to grow a greater variety of nutritious food. 
 
 Digital banking will grow. By 2030, 2 billion people who don’t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payments with their phones. 
 
 Online education will flourish as high-speed networks grow and smartphones become more affordable. 
 
 
 
 What do you think? We want to know your thoughts. Do you think these goals are achievable, or overly optimistic? What would your prediction be for development progress over the next 15 years? Share your thoughts in the comment thread below or tweet us at @GdnDevelopment. ||||| WASHINGTON — President Obama’s push for a new “middle-class economics” may go nowhere in Congress, but his ambitious array of proposals to raise stagnant incomes and provide more government support for struggling working families will frame his last two years in office and help make the politics of rich and poor a central issue in the campaign to succeed him. 
 
 With the economy finally on more solid ground, even leading Republicans, on Capitol Hill and on the nascent 2016 presidential campaign front, are tempering complaints about overall economic growth and refocusing on the more intractable problem of income inequality. 
 
 Mitt Romney, vowing a campaign to “end the scourge of poverty” if he runs for president a third time, has backed raising the minimum wage over the wishes of congressional leaders. 
 
 Similarly, Jeb Bush’s new “super PAC,” announced with the fanfare of a presidential declaration, proclaimed, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.” ||||| CLOSE Skip in Skip x Embed x Share Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says the lives of poor people around the world will improve more over the next 15 years "than at any time in history." (Jan. 22) AP 
 
 July 9, 2012. Melinda Gates, co-chair and trustee, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, visits a baby in the Marie Stopes International outreach program at Wakhinane health post, Dakar, Senegal. (Photo: Frederic Courbet, Gates Foundation) 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO — Despite the sober tone of the times — tensions with Russia, the growing threat of terrorism — one altruistic husband and wife duo spies a gradual improvement in the state of the world. 
 
 "We see heartbreaking things, but we also hear from people who tell us roads are improving and they can get their goods to market," says Melinda Gates, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual letter Wednesday. 
 
 "The world is changing for the better for many of the poor, and that's what fuels us," she said in a phone interview with USA TODAY. 
 
 Such optimism stands in contrast to the heavy issues under discussion this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where global leaders are meeting under an economic backdrop that shows 1% of the world's population will control half its assets by 2016, according to a new Oxfam study. 
 
 “'We know that when women can participate equally in a country's economy, the GDP goes up 12%.'” Melinda Gates 
 
 The letter, which marks the 15th anniversary of the $42 billion Seattle-based foundation, outlines how the organization wants to see further improvements by 2030 in the areas of: 
 
 Health. The foundation's goal is to help cut the number of children dying before age 5 to one in 40, from one in 20 today; reduce the number of women dying in childbirth; and ratchet up efforts to eradicate polio, malaria and HIV. "Health is why Bill and I started the foundation," says Gates. "If you are dealing with malaria, your main battle is just to stay alive." 
 
 Farming. When you have "7 in 10 African adults who are farmers, it's critical we not only push harder to improve their crop yields through science and technology but also make sure infrastructure is there, from roads to banking, that help people turn their crops into income," says Gates, noting that time is of the essence as Africa will be feeding 200 million more people by 2030. 
 
 Gender inequality. "We know that when women can participate equally in a country's economy, the GDP goes up 12%," says Gates. She adds that the empowerment of Third World women is linked to education, "which has a trickle-down effect in that they then marry later and have healthier children later." 
 
 (Photo: Prashant Panjiar for Gates Foundation) 
 
 While the Gates Foundation's biggest achievement to date "is getting the cost of vaccines down 37% and developing a market for such companies, which have grown from five to 12," Gates says progress on a large scale is only capable through strategic and significant First World government funding. 
 
 "Philanthropy can take risks where governments can't, but ultimately large governments need to contribute," says Gates. "We as citizens need to keep pressure on so that happens." 
 
 Timed with the letter's release is a new initiative from the foundation called Global Citizen. "People who want to help and connect with other individuals and groups who care" will be networked through the organization, which can be accessed through gatesletter.com, she says. 
 
 "When I visit places like Tanzania, the change on the ground is palpable," says Gates. "It's up to all of us to continue this fight." 
 
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– A bold prediction, courtesy of the Gates Foundation: The lives of people in poor countries "will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any time in history." That statement comes via the foundation's annual letter, published today, which makes some other "big bets." Among them: Polio will be eradicated by 2020, Africa's agricultural productivity will increase by 50% by 2030, and deaths of children under 5 will be cut in half by 2030, the Guardian and the AP report. Why are Bill and Melinda Gates so confident? Their foundation is celebrating its 15th anniversary, and the progress against inequity that they've seen in those 15 years is "very exciting—so exciting that we are doubling down on the bet we made 15 years ago, and picking ambitious goals for what's possible 15 years from now." In addition to polio, the foundation says guinea worm, elephantiasis, and blinding trachoma will be eliminated by 2030. There will also be a single-dose cure for malaria, a vaccine to prevent it spreading to mosquitoes that bite those with the disease, and a diagnostic test to reveal the infected, the Gateses predict. The foundation also foresees a rise in digital banking and online education and will push for gender equality. "We know that when women can participate equally in a country's economy, the GDP goes up 12%," Melinda Gates tells USA Today. (Help for the poor and inequality appear to be a hot topic, with Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush each taking on the issue, the New York Times reports.)