Bill Gates on the toughest question he's ever had to answer

Bill Gates also acknowledged that child mortality is not an easy subject to talk about.

Bill Gates on Wednesday revealed that the toughest question that he has ever had to answer was not one related to his business.

Taking to Twitter, the co-founder of Microsoft shared that he was asked the question 25 years ago and has thought about it every day since: "Why do children die?"

"I think 'why do children die?' is one of the most important questions ever," Gates wrote in his blog. "It is hard to think of a measure of how a society is doing that reveals more than whether it is protecting its children, and especially its most vulnerable children. And the better we understand why children die, the more we can do to save them."

Bill Gates also acknowledged that child mortality is not an easy subject to talk about. "As a parent, I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a child. It is shocking even to see the words “children” and “die” used in the same sentence," he wrote.

This is the toughest question I’ve ever had to answer: https://t.co/IavkgCqAyI pic.twitter.com/zWSO9I82CU

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) September 6, 2022

There is, however, a silver lining.

"The very good news is that the world has made phenomenal progress in this area over the past several decades. Since 1990, the number of children who die every year has fallen by more than half!" the billionaire philanthropist wrote on GatesNotes.

"If progress on child mortality is a good measure of the state of the world, then—despite the huge global setbacks of the past few years, including COVID-19—the state of the world has improved dramatically. And based on what I know about innovations that are still to come, we can look forward to even more progress in the years ahead."

Read more: Bill Gates: 'Life is more fun when you have a friend like Warren Buffett'