Inside the Gates Foundation

The Gates Foundation is the world's biggest philanthropic organization with an endowment of $35 billion — about three times more than the second-biggest in the U.S., the Ford Foundation. Last year, the Gates Foundation gave away $3 billion. That's an amount on par with the individual gross domestic product that year of almost three dozen countries, including Togo and Swaziland.

But the Gates Foundation has been painted by critics and even admirers as sometimes too heavy-handed in saying how its money is used and too prone to listening to the recommendations of experts vs. grass-roots groups when setting its strategies to battle global poverty.

"There's concern that their programs are too top down and they don't listen to the grass roots," says Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. The institute, which is part of Georgetown University, focuses on research and an array of public policy issues.