The Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Saturday launched a global thought leadership platform to help frame and stimulate regional and global debate on vital development issues shaping the Middle East.

Every year Bill and Melinda Gates write an annual letter, laying out a strategy for eliminating poverty and suffering in the world. Here it is for 2015. These letters are a big event for a lot of reasons: They are smart, brief, readable and backed by a huge chunk of cash. This makes them one of the most widely read influential documents on international development every year. All the more reason to take a critical look and discuss.

International development is dying; people just don't buy it anymore. The West has been engaged in the project for more than six decades now, but the number of poor people in the world is growing, not shrinking, and inequality between rich and poor continues to widen instead of narrow.