Melinda Gate Foundation Last week, just a few days after the White House proposed dramatic cuts to health and development aid, I headed to Indonesia. The timing was coincidental — the trip had been planned for months — but the reason I was going happened to be especially relevant to our country’s national debate. Indonesia has strategically used foreign aid to transform itself from a poor nation into a middle-income one. I was there to talk about the role that smart investments in contraceptives have played in the transformation. Many people don’t realize the role contraceptives play in building a more stable and prosperous world. For most of my life, I certainly didn’t. But after Bill and I started our foundation and I began spending time in developing countries, women kept telling me about their unmet need for family planning and asking what I could do to help. When I started looking at the data, I learned that contraceptives are actually one of the greatest anti-poverty innov
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