Decades later, significant progress has been made in global health as noted by Bill and Melinda in their letter: “If we could show you only one number that proves how life has changed for the poorest, it would be 122 million – the number of children’s lives saved since 1990. Every September, the UN announces the number of children under five who died the previous year. If you add it all up, 122 million children under age five have been saved over the past 25 years.”
Progress Bill and Melinda accredit chiefly to increased access to vaccination for children. “At the start we just couldn’t understand why vaccines weren’t available to every child who needed them. There were no market incentives to serve people… The market wasn’t working for vaccines for poor kids because there weren’t enough buyers… we’d never seen that before.”
In response, the Gates Foundation partnered in setting up the Vaccine Alliance which, “connects companies who develop vaccines with wealth governments that help with funding and developing countries that get the vaccines to their people.”
Since the year 2000, the Vaccine Alliance has helped immunise 580 million children around the world with the United States credited by Bill and Melinda as being, “a major donor.”
While it had been made clear in the preparation for the Capital FM News interview with Melinda that she would not be discussing the election of US President Donald Trump, she did respond to the question of whether she was concerned the change in administration and its ‘America First’ policy would result in a reduction of funding to the Vaccine Alliance; her answer: every effort had been made to impress upon the Trump administration, the life impacting nature of what Gavi makes possible.
After all, Bill and Melinda argue, vaccines just make business sense. “For every dollar (Sh100) spent on childhood immunisations, you get $44 (Sh4400) in economic benefits. That includes saving the money that families lose when a child is sick and a parent can’t work.”
And while she may have been hesitant, understandably given the stakes, to take on the hot button topic that is @realDonaldTrump, she had no qualms taking on another controversial subject: contraceptives.
“I’m not ashamed to say I use contraceptives,” loud and proud she told Capital FM News.
Loud and proud perhaps because as per their math, they save lives, not take them. “When a mother can choose how many children to have, her children are healthier, they’re better nourished, their mental capacities are higher – and parents have more time and money to spend on each child’s health and schooling.”
But the now vocal advocate for modern family planning admits that having been raised Catholic, she did face an internal struggle before picking up the bullhorn. “But the more I interacted with the women we work with, the more evident the truth became.”
And ‘truth’ is how, Melinda told Capital FM News, she deals with the naysayers who criticise her championing for the use of modern family planning methods. An advocacy Buffet conceded was, “gutsy but right.”
“I remember visiting the home of a mother in Niger named Sadi, whose six children were competing for her attention as we talked. She told me, ‘It would not be fair for me to have another child. I can’t afford to feed the ones I have.’
“In a Kenyan slum, I met a young mother named Mary who had a business selling backpacks from scraps of blue-jean fabric. She invited me into her home, where she was sewing and watching her two small children. She used contraceptives because, she said, ‘life is tough.’ I asked if her husband supported her decision. She said, ‘he knows life is tough, too.’”
Not all husbands are as accommodating and as Bill notes in his letter to Buffet, “poverty is sexist,” and yet it is among the poorer communities that the Gates Foundation works.
Melinda told Capital FM News that it is for this reason that they form community partnerships, to better appreciate and thereby navigate the various customs. “We don’t go in and claim to know best.”
In their letter to Buffet, Melinda illustrates this point by telling of Imams in Senegal who in allaying fears that contraception is inconsistent with Islam, inspire poverty eradication from within.
Bill and Melinda also testify of the importance of women’s self-help groups to this end – as they’ve witnessed in India.
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