Gates Foundation adds Iraq to its focus

Gates Foundation adds Iraq to its focus
By Victoria Kim in New York
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 15 2007 22:09 | Last updated: August 15 2007 22:09


The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is making its first foray into Iraq, funding a new initiative to relocate more than 150 scholars facing threat and persecution.

In a departure from its focus on projects in health and development, the foundation will provide $5m ($3.7m, £2.5m) for a project granting fellowships to Iraqi scholars seeking to continue their work at institutions in other countries.

A further $5m for the project has been approved by the US Congress.

The attempt to help Iraqi academics is the most ambitious project of the Scholar Rescue Fund, an organisation founded in 2002 by Wall Street figures including investors George Soros and Dr Henry Jarecki, Tom Russo, vice-chairman of Lehman Brothers, and Henry Kaufman, former Salomon Brothers economist.

Officers at the fund, which has helped scholars from Iran to Zimbabwe, began to focus on Iraq after violence – such as a bombing outside a Baghdad university this year that killed 70 people – caused the number of applications from there to soar.

Requests for help from Iraqi academics jumped to as many as 40 a week after averaging three or four a month before autumn 2006. So far, the fund has helped 17 Iraqi scholars find work in other countries.

Iraq is “the closest thing that any of us have seen to the Holocaust in terms of attacks to science and learning”, said Allan Goodman, president and chief executive of the non-profit International Institute of Education, which administers the fund.

“It is not even clear who is doing it,” said Dr Jarecki, the fund’s chairman. “No one is being arrested. No one is being punished for harming scholars.”

Mr Goodman, who has overseen the rescue of 140 scholars worldwide since the fund’s inception, said: “Gates is participating in a massive rescue of science and learning.”

Bill and Melinda Gates support the project because “the protection of part of Iraq’s intellectual capital ... will be essential for Iraq’s future development,” a spokeswoman for the foundation said.

Many of the scholars will be relocated to neighbouring Jordan, where some are already living in poverty, in some cases driving taxis rather than teaching.

The fund hopes scholars will eventually be able to continue teaching students in Iraq through long-distance learning programmes, such as televised lectures.

Dr Jarecki said the fund also hopes the project will reintegrate Iraqi scholars into the international academic community after years of isolation under authoritarian rule.