Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and Robin Li, chief executive officer of China’s most popular search engine Baidu Inc., said they will form a global alliance for public health.
The first initiative by the alliance, between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s richest charitable fund, and the Baidu Charitable Foundation, will be a program encouraging smokers to quit the habit, the foundations announced at a press conference in Beijing today.
“When we think of the creativity and the connection to so many people that Baidu has, that may be a real asset in getting out these health-related messages,” Gates said at the briefing. “We’re hoping that other people will join in, but there’s no one I’d rather be partnering with than Robin Li and the Baidu Foundation.”
It’s the second charity trip to China for Gates in nine months after a September visit in which he and Warren Buffett met with 50 Chinese leaders in business and philanthropy to discuss charitable giving. Gates, 55, is pressing the world’s rich to give away more of their money.
Gates started the Giving Pledge last June with Buffett for billionaires who agree to commit half their fortunes to charity. The two traveled to India in March to discuss giving with business leaders there.
Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 after dropping out of Harvard University and since then the company has become the world’s largest software maker. He retired from active management of the company in 2008 to run the Gates Foundation, which was founded in 2000.
The alliance with the Gates foundation will start with helping smokers quit and raising awareness of the harm from second-hand smoke, Li said. The alliance will undertake further public health initiatives in the future and will use China’s large online community to spread health messages, he said. While China has more than 300 million smokers, the even greater number of Internet users provides an easy way to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking, Li said. China is the world’s largest Internet market with 477 million users.
The public health alliance between the foundations will be “open-ended” and will operate both in China and around the world, the organizations said in a statement.
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