POV: You’re having dinner with Bill Gates at a hawker centre in S’pore

In the days since I had the privilege of spending an hour or so with Bill Gates, many people have been asking me: “What was he like?”

Three things stuck out to me about that man:

• He can surprise you with what he takes an interest in;
• He’s at heart an optimist;
• And he loves his satay

There are legendary stories of what the personal computer pioneer was like in his heyday, but the 69-year-old version of Bill Gates was mellow.

In fact, he came across as laidback in a way where he didn’t impose the weight of his historic status on you.

When I greeted him outside Newton Food Centre, he looked at me somewhat bemusedly when I blurted out that it was “surreal to be standing in front of Bill Gates”.

It had been a packed two-day visit to Singapore for him, filled to the brim with speaking engagements at conferences and meetings with government leaders.

Along the way, his foundation had announced that it was opening an office in Singapore, in order to “access the science to partner with the philanthropic community" and "the research being done" here.

But the agenda for our visit to the hawker centre: to introduce Bill to local food and check out Singapore's easy-to-use QR payment system for consumers and merchants, given Gates Foundation's interest in inclusive digital financial services.

So as we strolled under the arches of the hawker centre and through the parting wall of phone cameras trained on Gates, I tried my best to get the philanthropist up to speed on the history and significance of hawkers in Singapore.

Gates’ focus on affordable nutritious food

Newton Food Centre, opened in 1971, was Singapore’s first hawker centre designed and built with a garden setting that complemented our “garden city” image.

Its establishment opened the doors for the resettlement of street hawkers into purpose-built buildings, tackling public health issues surrounding street hawking, which lacked proper equipment, amenities and good personal and food hygiene.

Today, there are over 120 NEA-managed hawker centres and markets that serve up affordable and delicious cuisines that represent our nation’s multicultural make-up.

All this dovetails nicely with the work the Gates Foundation does in the developing world.

Sanitation and hygiene were amongst the first issues that caught the attention of Gates and his then-wife Melinda; they had read an article about the millions of children in poor countries who die from diseases that had been long eliminated in the U.S.

Affordable and nutritious food was another cause that Gates believed was important.

“If you're very poor in a rural area, your diet is very limited,” Gates explained to me.

“You may have a cereal crop and a bean crop, but very little protein [like] milk, eggs, or meat.

That’s not the only problem, but a lot of kids, they're malnourished because of that lack of protein.”

The foundation’s solution? Improving the productive abilities of chickens in a given country so that they lay larger eggs and in larger quantities. “That’s been very successful,” Gates said, matter-of-factly.

“We try and make the cows more productive, so the cost of the milk goes down a lot, and we help the farmers with better seeds.

I didn't know much about agriculture when we got started, but I learnt that, the very poor people in the world, a lot of them are farmers, and so you have to help them be more productive in order to lift them up, particularly the women.”

Ordering satay from Uncle Toh

How about our solution for protein for Gates’ dinner at Newton Food Centre?

We made our way to Uncle Toh’s stall, where the hawker has been selling satay and chicken wings for the last 32 years.

Gates took a particular interest first in a kitschy light-up display of fake charcoals illustrating the long-established method of cooking satay, before turning his attention to how we’d be paying for the meal.

Five sticks of mutton, five sticks of beef, and five sticks of chicken — that would be S$13, paid for conveniently through the scanning of a QR code using a participating bank’s app on a smartphone.

You’ll be glad to know that thanks to yours truly, Gates is now well aware of the cross-border payments that Singapore has established with neighbours like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

These connections, enabled by NETS, make payments across borders efficient, convenient, and secure, to the benefit of travellers and small businesses.

Gates, ever curious, quizzed Uncle Toh about how often customers paid digitally and was pleasantly surprised by the answer: digital payments are getting more popular.

This convenience is facilitated by the low fees that NETS charges vendors for its services, as opposed to the higher fees credit card companies typically levy.

Gates’ questions weren’t laced with the condescension you might expect from someone who more often than not is the smartest person in the room.

Whether he was speaking to Uncle Toh or heads of departments from a big local business, Gates' line of questioning seemed to serve the purpose of satisfying his curiosity, ploughing deeper understanding of solutions that have worked for others, and planting the seeds of inspiration for whatever new panacea the foundation may begin to work on.

It’s not technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement that Gates is interested in. But rather development that has the potential to solve real world problems and improve lives.

“You know, unfortunately, to use a traditional bank account, the fees are very high and so the amount you can save is minimal. And so, how do people save?” Gates said to me later on when we discussed his interest in the digital QR code payments and phone banking apps.

“Maybe they try and buy gold or buy more cows.”

Being able to transact using apps on phones, on the other hand, helps to facilitate the financial inclusion that the foundation is working to build in poorer countries. These developments have the potential to solve real-world problems and improve lives.

“Sometimes you’ll have women’s groups that work together to collect money. Microfinance. And now that it can be done digitally, [the capacity to microfinance] is a lot larger than when they had to do it with normal currency.”

Even getting money from other countries back to your homeland, you used to have to pay fees like three or four per cent and now that should be down to more like one per cent, so that’s a huge improvement, and people can see their money [on their phones].”

Yet, Gates, ever on the lookout for improvements to be made, sees the opportunity in banking apps to optimise outcomes for those who live a world away from financial hubs like Singapore.

“Now what we want to do is, when you have that phone, it’s actually helping to educate you about spending money. When you sell your produce, maybe you should save to buy the seeds for next year, to buy the fertiliser for next year. Or if you're careful, some loans — not all loans — but some loans make sense. Like borrowing to buy more fertiliser, if it'll really significantly improve your crop productivity.”

Farms in Africa, he continues to explain, only reap a quarter of the productivity of farms in the U.S. or other wealthier countries.

“We want to lift that up because Africa and other parts of Asia, they have population growth, they have climate change, and only by innovating with the seeds and helping those farmers, including access to fertiliser, can we help them feed themselves.”

Introducing Gates to hawker food

Waiting for us at our table at the food centre was a smorgasbord of Singaporean cuisine and beverages: chicken rice, fishball soup, carrot cake, roti prata, sugar cane juice and lime juice.

But from the get-go, only one dish really held Gates’ attention.

As I said earlier, Gates loves his satay.

Though he was game enough to give every dish a chance, it was Uncle Toh’s grilled meat skewers that the Microsoft co-founder continually returned to.

At some point Gates took to using his bare billionaire hands to pry chunks of meat off their wooden skewers, before popping them into his mouth.

It’s not the way most of us in Singapore eat satay, but how would Gates know better? Perhaps peeling the meat off the stick is the most efficient way to enjoy satay — if anyone is too qualified to teach us how to do things better, Bill Gates is him.

Or maybe he’d made some quick calculations and decided that he didn’t want to take the risk of accidentally impaling himself on a satay stick.

In between mouthfuls of satay, Gates took a moment to reflect on the work of his foundation, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

“The big area that succeeded beyond our expectations is the work to help children to survive a lot of diseases. In poor countries, a lot of the deaths are children, sadly. It used to be globally around 10 per cent of kids would die before the age of five. Now we have that down to about five per cent, so pretty good progress.”

That's thanks in part to the progress the Gates Foundation has made in reducing the cost of vaccines and having them available in the developing world.

In fact, Gates regards the foundation’s biggest achievement as having halved the price of vaccines that protect against stomach flu and pneumococcal diseases.

Yet there is still much that the billionaire hopes to achieve.

“There’s a lot of diseases like measles and malaria that we’d like to just get rid of completely,” said Gates.

“Polio, we need another four or five years to get that one away, because it used to paralyse hundreds of thousands of children every year. And then when we succeed with that, we’ll go after some other diseases.”

Malnourishment, HIV, tuberculosis — these are just some of the targets on Gates’ hitlist.

“I think we can cut childhood deaths from where we are today, in half again,” said the philanthropist.

And that’s where Singapore can play its part.

Talented

On May 5, the Gates Foundation announced that its soon-to-be established office in Singapore would help “to strengthen its partnerships with government, philanthropies, and institutions across Southeast Asia and support progress towards global health and development goals”.

The move was supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB); its Managing Director Jermaine Loy cited our nation’s “strategic location and research ecosystem” as providing a platform for meaningful influence across Southeast Asia and the world.

In other words, Singapore will be a hub for the foundation’s work in the region.

As Gates put it somewhat bluntly towards me: “We don’t do rich country healthcare”.

“I mean that’s very important and some philanthropists do. But our health work is all to help those who are most at risk of dying.”

Singapore, explained Gates, has the benefits of having top universities and a highly capable government that would be open to funding initiatives, should the foundation be able to “prove that it works”.

Of course, the growing community of family offices in the island state also provides opportunities for Gates to partner with other would-be philanthropists.

In a world where some of the big traditional funders of global aid are increasingly turning inward, Gates and his foundation are still seeking to correct the market inequities and failures which are costing millions of lives globally.

“The generosity of the United States in some countries is going down right now, so we’re in a little bit of a crisis,” said Gates, “but even so, my prognosis is still optimistic and we’ll get back to improving it.”

And so the foundation’s decision to deepen its presence here presents another opportunity for Singapore to have an impact far beyond the circumference of a tiny red dot on the global map.

“A lot of solutions will start here and then move to the rest of the world,” predicted Gates.

When asked for one word to describe Singapore, the billionaire had no shortage of adjectives: well-run, forward-looking, technocratic, rational.

He eventually settled on “talented”.

But just like technological advancement, Bill Gates isn’t interested in talent for talent’s sake.

Talent must be applied, harnessed, and then expressed, hopefully in ways that are beneficial beyond just the gifted individual.

Tapping into Singapore’s talent pool, is no doubt an enticing prospect for futurists and philanthropists hoping to make an impact. After all, Singapore is highly ranked for attracting and nurturing talent.

“ I’ve gotten to meet — from Lee Kuan Yew through the entire history of the leadership here — I’ve gotten to meet with all the leaders,” Gates mused.

“It’s amazing how far Singapore has come. Now it’s a chance to give back and help others.”

Watch our full interview with Bill Gates here:

Top image by Mothership