“If you go out in the village, you’ll find the big man and the key aides to the big man and people who work for the key aides. That hierarchy stifles conversation. It keeps people from talking about what matters. Women’s groups don’t get as caught up in that, so they’re better at spreading information and driving change,” Bill writes.
Melinda, the storyteller of the duo according to Bill and thereby the ‘getter of the story’, told Capital FM News she got to the heart of issues by practicing empathy and simply by listening. “When I sit on that mat and I’m offered tea, I try and put myself in her shoes. I try and relate as a mother myself. I remember a lady in Niger who told me ‘here we talk. We talk when we’re fetching water, we talk when we’re grinding our food.’ And so I always make it a point to give them the opportunity to ask me questions; to try and foster an environment conducive to an honest as possible exchange.”
And while vaccines and modern family planning methods may have greatly aided the saving of 122 million children’s lives since 1990, there are still children dying from preventable or at least manageable causes and the Gates Foundation continues to drive change for the further halving of that number by 2030 to below 3 million.
“19 million children, many of them living in conflict zones or remote areas, are still not fully immunised. Right now, there are still more than 225 million women in the developing world who don’t want to get pregnant but don’t have access to contraceptives. The challenge is to provide women access to the widest range of contraceptives so they can find a method that fits their lives.
“When women in developing countries space their births by at least three years, their babies are almost twice as likely to survive their first year.”
Of particular concern to the Foundation now however is newborn deaths. “As the total number of childhood deaths has dropped, the proportion that are newborn deaths have gone up. Newborn deaths now represent 45 percent of all childhood deaths, up from 40 percent in 1990.”
“Every year, one million infants die on the day they’re born and a total of nearly 3 million die in their first month of life.”
Another area of research the foundation is now focused on, Melinda told Capital FM News, is nutrition.
“Nutrition is not just about preventing deaths. Malnutrition destroys the most human potential on the planet. Kids who are stunted are not just below their global peers in height; they’re behind their peers in cognitive development, and that will limit these children their whole lives,” the Gates write in their letter to Buffet.
When it’s all said and done however, the challenges notwithstanding, the gains made in global health cannot be glossed over and neither can the contribution of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As for Kenyans? After a startled laugh at the question, Melinda described them as striking her as an ingenious people with an entrepreneurial spirit. Perhaps like her and Bill? As for Nairobi, a buzzing city with signs of growth whenever she visits, “it always seems like there’s a road being built.”
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