Bill Gates has been investing in health initiatives for 20 years now, and he writes in the Wall Street Journal that one specific kind of investment in this field once in a while neglects to pay off. It includes what those in the worldwide wellbeing field call “financing and delivery”— associations that make sense of how to get needed medical supplies to impoverished countries. Gates composes that he and his wife, Melinda, have put $10 billion throughout the years into three such associations through their Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the Global Fund; and the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. As it turns out, “they are probably the best investments our foundation has ever made.”

Utilizing an information crunching device from the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Gates composes that on the off chance that they had put the equivalent $10 billion into the S&P 500, it would have produced somewhere close to $12 billion and $17 billion for developing countries. Not bad. Yet, the arrival on their investments into the three groups has far surpassed that. “The $10 billion that we gave to help provide vaccines, drugs, bed nets and other supplies in developing countries created an estimated $200 billion in social and economic benefits,” he writes. The reason is fairly basic: “They’ve created a lot of wealth, because when people aren’t sick in bed, they can go to work or school.”