The Gates Foundation is commendable for its focus on the "big problems" and the use of more rigorous selection and evaluation criteria for grants. One of Bill Gates' recurring themes is that the founders of Google and Facebook should not be prioritizing Internet access over projects such as a malaria cure. I think Gates is wrong.
As Nobel economist Michael Spence explains in The Next Covergence, poverty is caused by the absence of information. One's net worth is constantly depleted because one lacks the information to price transactions correctly. If information is easily available through the Internet and the recipeient has basic reading skills, then the idividual has the necessary foundation to manage their own life (assuming no discrimination). Information availability is the most challenging ingredient to achieve individual empowerment, but with individual empowerment people can then address their own economic, health and political problems.
One could argue that if the people die from Malaria, then individual empowerment never has a chance to operate. One could argue that if they don't die from Malaria, the poor could die from Aids, political insurrection or one hundred other causes.
The scale of the social problems suggests to me that focused approaches such as Gate's malaria research will not make as much of an impact as the Internet-Information approach that lays the groundwork for individual empowerment. Basically, what Gates appears to miss is that education and information availability are the best way to mobilize sufficient people to solve the large social problems.