Bill and Melinda Gates’ big bet -By Tolu Ogunlesi

Every January since 2009, Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, and his wife, Melinda, have written a “letter” to the world. This year’s letter came out on Thursday, January 22. Two days before it came out, I spoke with Mr. Gates by phone, to talk about the yet-to-be-released letter, and the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Nigeria and across Africa.

The Gates’ 2015 letter is built around one “big bet”: that “the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history.” That big bet is broken down into four areas: Health (a reduction in child mortality); agriculture (food self-sufficiency in Africa); banking (the transformative power of mobile banking) and education (the transformative power of smartphones, software and the internet, as learning tools). It is a bold vision, but not far-fetched, and we should all be concerned about seeing it come to pass in our villages and towns and cities.

I wanted to know why Gates and his wife write the annual letter. He said: “A lot of people are very interested in equity and what’s going on with the poor and the things that the foundation works on, but unlike me they have a full time job, and (this is) a chance every year to kind of summarise some things that are going very well; give them a sense of what’s likely to happen in the future; talk to them about how they might be involved even in a modest way with their political voice or donations or time. It’s a great opportunity to talk about what I’ve seen and explain what I’m worried about, and what I’m excited about.”

He also spoke on the symbolism of this year, 2015, in relation to the annual letter. This year marks 15 years since the launch of the foundation, as well as 15 years since the Millennium Development Goals were launched by the United Nations. In writing this year’s letter, Gates said he found an opportunity to look ahead to the next 15 years, which will also coincide with the implementation of the “Sustainable Development Goals”, the successor programme to the MDGs.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000, is the wealthiest privately-owned foundation in the world. The audacity of its world-changing vision (playing out in health care, agriculture, nutrition, water and sanitation, education, family planning, and other areas) is in keeping with the scale of the ambition that propelled Gates to conquer the world with his computer software. The Gates have announced that the bulk of their wealth will go to the foundation, and have donated more than $28bn of their personal fortune to it. Billionaire Warren Buffet, the third richest man in the world, has also given away more than $15bn of his wealth to the foundation since 2006. Today, the Foundation’s endowment is worth in excess of $40bn.

The Foundation works primarily in the United States and in more than 100 developing countries across the world, through the disbursement of grants. It has given out $31.6bn since it was launched (that amount, it occurs to me, is roughly equivalent to Nigeria’s annual federal budget). It is involved in a lot of work in Nigeria, focused on polio eradication, immunisation, maternal and infant care, sanitation, development of improved yam and cassava varieties, and improving financial inclusion. It was also involved in the fight against Ebola in West Africa, committing $50m in donations. Gates told me the Foundation is currently working with a number of Nigerian states (including Lagos and Kano) to strengthen their primary health care systems. “By focusing on the basics, you can save a lot of lives,” he said.

I asked him to sum up the big lessons he’s learnt working in Africa, with governments and civil society. His answer highlighted the importance of properly functioning government systems, and how these can translate into significant differences in performance levels across Africa. “Take the vaccination system in Ghana, they managed to get over 90 per cent coverage by having professional staff and a good measurement system, and they don’t spend that much more than countries like Nigeria, where the vaccination coverage is less than 50 per cent. So, getting the government systems to work with the right people and management – I’ve seen it’s pretty magical when that can happen.”

In Nigeria, we try to depend on the NGOs and civil society groups to bypass a lot of government dysfunction, failing to realise that even the impact of outside intervention is still largely dependent on the quality of internal bureaucratic systems. The lesson there is that we need to pay fresh attention to reforming our civil service. It’s not going to be the easiest of tasks, and will not happen overnight; but it needs to start somewhere, and needs political will and strong moral authority – especially from the top, i.e. the President – to push it through.

My final question to Gates was regarding his thoughts on Nigeria’s demographic time bomb – a surging youth population that will need education and jobs in the decades ahead. In response, he pointed out the “strong connection” between “malnutrition and health” and education, and how investments in education are very likely to be blunted by the challenges of malnutrition and worms in children. I’m aware that that argument is not a new one in Nigeria; it has actually inspired a few states to launch school feeding programmes. What I’m not sure about is how committed state governments really are to ensuring the longterm success of those programmes, especially as we move into an age of austerity measures.

On the whole, Gates is very optimistic about Nigeria (“It’s doable!” could easily be his motto), while also realising that there’s a long way to go. “Nigeria absolutely represents a case where there’s a lot of progress being made but (also) a case where what still has to be done is very evident,” he said.

The fight against polio is one of the success stories. Today, the disease is endemic in only three countries in the world: Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. But Nigeria is gradually exiting the class. “We haven’t had a case of wild polio in Nigeria since July 24 (2014) ,” Gates said. “Every day, I get up and look at my email hoping not to get a message saying that we’ve had a polio case in Nigeria. The more time that goes by, the more chance there is that we’ve seen the last case.”

Child mortality continues to be a problem area. He pointed out that 10 per cent of Nigerian children die before the age of five. But he’s confident enough to bet on a 50 per cent reduction in that figure, over the next 15 years. He also thinks Nigeria needs to invest more in “reproductive health tools” and increase the ability of women – especially in northern Nigeria – to make informed decisions regarding their reproductive options. It is already being predicted that Nigeria will, by 2050, be the third most populous country in the world, after India and China (India will overtake China, and we will overtake the US, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan).

Take a moment to think about what that will mean; the prospects of having 400 million Nigerians, living in the same dire conditions as exist today. What sort of jobs will they have? What sort of housing, transport, education, health care, security? Imagine, in 2050, 400 million Nigerians still trying to manage perhaps 10,000MW or 20,000MW of electricity, or still depending on private boreholes and “pure water” satchets. An apocalyptic scenario, no doubt.

I didn’t ask for Gates’ thoughts on the coming elections, but in the course of our conversation, he touched on it. It’s his hope that Nigeria’s “democratic process” throws up “the most competent people at every level of the government.”