It’s not every day that you celebrate the 50th anniversary of El País at the Prado Museum and leave thinking that the world’s problem is not a lack of solutions, but the terrible way we communicate them. That day, Bill Gates spoke for half an hour. Half an hour of figures, decisions and real consequences. Half an hour in which, paradoxically, the most disturbing thing was not what he said, but thinking about how many of these things have been going on for years without anyone paying much attention to them.
I confess: I am 22 years old, I am an intern, and I still stumble over the word ‘communication’ like someone who walks into a huge house and cannot find the bathroom. That is why this text does not aim to teach anything; it only aims to voice the uncomfortable questions that arose in my mind.
One of the ideas that came up repeatedly in the conversation was this: from 2000 to 2025, infant mortality was cut in half. Not slightly. Not ‘a little’. In half. We could be witnessing the greatest decline in human history. Vaccines that cost $1.50. Injections that cost $2 and prevent women from bleeding to death during childbirth. Mosquito nets that prevent malaria from continuing to be a game of Russian roulette for millions of children.
And, even so, very few people talk about this.
This is where, as someone who is beginning to look at communication from the inside, something grates on me. Because if saving millions of lives isn’t a ‘sexy’ headline, what is? At what point did we decide that data only matters if it’s wrapped up in drama, conspiracy or apocalypse?
Lack of continuity
Gates mentioned something that struck me as rather shocking: last year, more children died than the year before. Not because a new disease had been discovered, but because international aid had been cut abruptly and haphazardly. Mosquito nets did not arrive. Nutritional supplements remained in warehouses. HIV drugs were wasted. People died. Not because of a lack of solutions, but because of a lack of continuity in the projects.
From the perspective of someone starting out in communications, this is almost surprising and ironic. The story is simple and brutal: give a little money, save millions; cut it, people die. Period. And yet, no one talks about this. It doesn’t make headlines, no posts go viral, it doesn’t provoke mass outrage.
Perhaps it is because it is too rational. Perhaps because there are no obvious villains nor plot twists that surprise us. Perhaps because accepting that the world improves with actions that are small, silent and constant is not very glamorous, nor exciting, nor worthy of a meme.
One of the most absurd moments of the talk was when Gates recounted how healthcare aid in Mozambique was cancelled because one province is called Gaza and someone, doing text searches, decided that this meant funding condoms for Hamas. The result: babies born with HIV because medication for pregnant mothers was cut off. If this were a television series, we would say that the script was implausible. But it was real. And it happened almost without anyone noticing.
Tell what does work well
Here appears the real elephant in the room of communication: we don’t know how to tell properly what does actually work. We know how to amplify mistakes, scandals and catastrophes, but we get bored by the long processes, the cumulative results, the slow improvements. We prefer collapse to progress because collapse has a narrative.
Gates repeatedly emphasised that the problem is not a lack of money, but perception. Many people believe that rich countries devote 10% of their budget to international aid. In reality, it is less than 1%. When this is explained to them, they readily agree to increase it to 2%. The problem is that no one explains it properly. Or no one tries hard enough.
As an intern, I find this particularly disturbing because it confronts me with a responsibility I didn’t know existed. Communicating is not just about making something understood, but deciding what deserves to be understood. And that’s where we fail miserably.
At the conference, he also spoke about things that sounded like science fiction: virtual doctors; tutors who know exactly where you are going wrong; African farmers receiving better advice than even the wealthiest farmer in Europe would have… All said with exasperating calm. Without expectation. Without epic background music. As if the future were boring paperwork.
And there lies the problem: what truly changes the world rarely seems spectacular at the time. It is quiet, slow, unphotogenic.
What really matters
Communication cannot just be about repeating facts. It has to provoke a little, make someone wonder why they didn’t know this before. Show the difference between what makes headlines and what really matters.
It is not about embellishing figures or selling cheap optimism. Gates made it clear that a pandemic worse than COVID is possible. But he also said that we have better tools than ever to deal with it. The two things coexist, and perhaps communicating well means not choosing just one.
I don’t intend to close any debate, nor am I in a position to do so. But one thing became clear to me: communication fails more because of how we tell things than because of what we know. And for someone just starting out, that’s a little scary… but also exciting.
If communication serves any purpose, it should make visible the everyday miracles that occur, even if they don’t get likes, even if they don’t go viral, even if they make people uncomfortable a little while someone smiles and thinks: “this should matter to me more than it does.”.
And perhaps, just perhaps, that is where the real work begins.
