What would you do with $5.3 billion? Buy a house? A car? A few of each? How about a country? With that kind of money I’m sure you could buy a few. As it turns out, Northwestern University’s endowment is over $5.3 billion, which eclipses the Gross Domestic Products of the poorest 19 countries in the world combined.
As awesome as it would be to say that our university owns a friggin’ country (let alone 19), there are laws in place that prevent something as cool as that. But it does force one to ask: With that much money lying around, should we be renovating Harris Hall and expanding Tech (which is big enough), or building hospitals in the Congo and soup kitchens in Burundi?
I did some research in this vein, and came up some with vital projects we could undertake for the five poorest countries in the world with the university’s endowment:
Eritrea – a school
58.6 percent of the total population of Eritrea is illiterate. Recovering from a war with your largest trade partner isn’t easy and might just leave your country in the dumps. The only hope for a stronger Eritrean economy in the future is for its population to step up and go back to school. If it cost Northwestern $5.3 million to renovate University Hall in 1993, imagine what you could do with $1 billion in Eritrea today. Satellite campus in Asmara, anyone?
Guinea-Bissau – a police department
Europe is partying it up lately. How do I know? Cocaine sales have tripled in the past decade. And where do they get it from? Guinea-Bissau.
Drug traffickers take advantage of the country’s weak government and use it as a launching pad for cocaine operations in England, the Netherlands and the rest of Europe. When the only revenue a country makes comes from fishing, agriculture and blow (and they’re probably not getting a lot of revenue from any of those departments), it’s bad news bears. What can we give Bissau-Guineans? A police station would help, though I’m not sure how much that would cost. Definitely a lot less than $5.3 billion for sure, especially at 456.94 Francs per U.S. dollar.
Liberia – basic infrastructure
Do you know how cheap it is to build basic infrastructure in rural Utah? Probably not. Not many people do, so I’m not surprised. In case you’re wondering, it costs about $25,268 per acre.
But you know who really needs infrastructure? Liberia. Years of civil war have left the country with a seemingly non-existent economy, barely any semblance of institutional security and almost no infrastructure. So the third way we could use the endowment? Pay for 12,800 acres of infrastructure in Liberia. Total cost: about $323 million. Ante up, Northwestern.
Burundi – a soup kitchen (or 300)
Let’s say you based your entire 2000 kilo-calorie diet on peanut butter (hell, I’d do it in a jiffy). That means that you’d only have spend $1.70 feeding yourself on a given day!
That might not tickle your fancy, but I’m pretty sure that the two out of three Burundians who go day-in and day-out undernourished wouldn’t mind one bit. Not to mention that 81 percent of the population does not have a reliable measure of getting food and the per capita food production rate is 1400 kilo-calories per person. At $3.3 million to feed every child in Burundi for a day, it doesn’t seem like a cheap venture to solve malnutrition in Burundi. But imagine what you could do with $1 billion (not even $5.3 billion) in a country as hungry as Burundi? Probably build a few soup kitchens for sure.
Democratic Republic of the Congo – a hospital
The average cost per square foot of a hospital built in the U.S. is about $239.93. So let’s say we build them a hospital about the size of Northwestern Memorial Hospital (3 million square feet). That’s only $719.8 million! Considering that labor and material costs in countries like the Congo should be considerably lower, it may not even be that much.
Why does the Congo need a functional hospital? Because 45,000 Congolese die every month, and not only because of violence. Most deaths are related to treatable diseases such as malaria, dysentery, and typhoid. They could use a bloody hospital.
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In all seriousness, $5.3 billion is clearly a lot of money, and we could do some great things with such an endowment. The university takes about 16 percent from the endowment to finance the operation of this great university. How about the other 84 percent? Now I know that we need that money to protect us from the perils of the future: the next global meltdown, doomsday, etc. But Eritreans, Bissau-Guineans, Liberians, Burundians and Congolese need something today, otherwise they won’t survive to see any kind of future. While our money is most likely to stay invested in projects that will help students do well, we certainly have the ability to help humanity do some good. Spend away, Mr. President.