'You have to let your heart break'

Melinda Gates permits herself one luxury. "I live in Seattle on a lake. Every day, if it's not freezing cold, and even if it's raining, I'll throw on an old windbreaker and go out in my kayak. That is my frivolous pleasure."

It was not easy, in a meeting room in London, to imagine the queen of aid in the guise of storm-swept canoeist. Her trouser suit, high heels and an immaculately dressed cascade of hair denoted a woman with the levers of power at her polished fingertips.

As joint head with her husband, Bill, of the Gates Foundation, Melinda presides over an organisation whose endowment of $39-billion (about R407-billion) dwarfs the economy of many nations. To see her purely as a superleague do-gooder and as half of one of the richest couples on earth would do little justice to her influence.

The Forbes list of the most powerful women in the world puts her at number three, behind German chancellor Angela Merkel and US Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen. You do not have to spend long in her company to gauge how she achieved that ranking.

When she addressed the World Health Assembly in Geneva last week, she urged global action on the largely preventable fate of the 5.5million babies who are born and die each year without leaving a trace that they ever lived. Although her wider focuses are the irreducibles of life and death, her methods - vaccines, mosquito nets and contraception - are the armoury of a steely businesswoman.

We met during her visit to the UK to see the secretary of state for international development, Justine Greening, and collect the honorary Dame of the British Empire awarded to her this year in recognition of her philanthropy and work in the developing world.

Born in Dallas in 1964, Melinda Ann French is the daughter of an engineer who set up a rental business to put his four children through college. "We worked on the properties. I mowed lawns, I scrubbed ovens and I cleaned houses after people left."

She also kept the company books on a home PC before taking a computer science degree and joining Microsoft, where she met the founder, Bill Gates, by chance at a conference dinner. "There were only two chairs left. I took one and, 20 minutes later, someone else who was even later took the last one next to me. That was Bill."

To celebrate their engagement, they organised an African safari. The Gateses returned to their luxurious home preoccupied by the memory of women weighed down by firewood and children.

Shortly after their marriage, Melinda left her job to raise her three children and establish the foundation that became a template for other billionaires. Along with the philanthropist Warren Buffett, the Gateses have so far inspired, or persuaded, more than 120 of the world's richest people to pledge at least half their fortunes to charity.

They plan to bequeath to their children a sense of duty, along with only a tiny fraction of a fortune destined mainly for charitable ends. "We talk about the issues we see in the developing world at the dinner table with the kids. They're very well informed," she said.

Besides visiting developing countries in their school holidays, the Gates children - two teenage daughters and a son - "all have chores around the house. You bet. And they also each work in a local charity in Seattle. They've chosen ones close to their heart and they do hands-on work there anonymously".

"We have an agreement in the family about how much money they will each get, and we believe our kids should go off and have their own careers and their own lives."

Although the foundation will be wound up after the death of the last surviving partner, she expects no let-up in her work for decades to come.

As a devout Catholic, she struggled before promoting contraception, said Melinda. "Absolutely. But women's stories would ring in my head. They would say: 'I can't have another child. I already have four, and I can barely feed them.'

So yes, I wrestled with my faith. But I'm a Catholic and I use contraceptives, and I think it's the right thing for women all over the world."

Will the pope adopt her message? "I think the pope will take the decisions he thinks are right for the church. I don't think he'll necessarily follow my messages, but I think he cares about the poor. If he's out talking with families, he will hear - I hope - the real needs on the ground," she said.

God and morality aside, the Gateses' money, coupled with rigorous business practice, has bestowed a quasi-divine power. When Bill says that there will soon be no poor countries left, or when Melinda speaks of a drop from 20million to 6.6million in the under-fives who die each year, they claim no personal credit. Yet the work they have undertaken, along with charity and government partners, has changed the world.

Every vaccine administered and life saved is monitored. In a new departure, African women are doing door-to-door surveys with cellphones and downloading the findings to a data bank.

"Before coming home," said Melinda, "I always take time to reflect. What did I take on emotionally? What might inform our strategies?"

For the first years the Gateses were together, she clung to her anonymity far more jealously than to her money. "Then I decided that, if I could give voice to some of the women who talked to me, it was worth giving up some privacy, even though I am a very private person."

Many times, she has been reduced to tears by an encounter with another distraught mother carrying another dying child.

"You have to let your heart break," she said. "That is what allows me to take action." - ©The Daily Telegraph, London