An edited version of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’s speech, "Living Together", delivered during the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria
yesterday
THE theme of this year’s Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture is “living together”. This is fitting, because in many ways, “living together” was also the theme of Nelson Mandela’s life. The system he fought against was based on the opposite idea –that people should be kept apart.
I was nine years old when Nelson Mandela went to Robben Island. As a boy, I learnt about him in school. I remember seeing reports about the anti-Apartheid movement on the evening news.
The first time I spoke with him was in 1994, when he called to ask me to help fund South Africa’s election. I admired Nelson Mandela very much, I knew the election was historic, and I did what I could to help.
Melinda and I had always known we’d give our wealth to philanthropy – eventually. But when we were confronted with such glaring inequity, we started thinking about how to take action sooner.
This sense of urgency was spurred on by another trip, in 1997, when I travelled to Joburg for the first time, as a representative of Microsoft.
I spent most of the time in business meetings. But one day, I went to a community centre in Soweto where Microsoft had donated computers. My visit to Soweto – which was quite different then than it is now – taught me how much I had to learn about the world outside the comfortable bubble I’d lived in all my life.
As I walked into the community centre, I noticed there wasn’t any electrical power. To keep the computers on, they had rigged up an extension cord that connected to a diesel generator outside. I knew that the minute I left, the generator would get moved to a more urgent task.
Soon after that, we started our foundation – because the costs of waiting had become clear. Our work is based on the belief that every person – no matter where they live – should have the opportunity to lead a healthy and productive life. We have spent the past 15 years learning about the issues and looking for the leverage points where we can do the most to help people seize that opportunity.
It was when I started coming to Africa regularly for the foundation that I came to know Nelson Mandela personally. Aids was one of the first issues our foundation worked on, and Nelson Mandela was both an adviser and an inspiration.
What we talked about most was the stigma around Aids. So I remember 2005 very clearly, when his son died of Aids.
Rather than stay silent about the cause of his son’s death, Nelson Mandela announced it publicly, because he knew that stopping the disease required breaking down the walls of fear and shame that surrounded it.
PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES
It is important to recall Nelson Mandela’s legacy – and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so. But Nelson Mandela was concerned with the future. He believed people could make the future better than the past.
The Millennium Development goals adopted by the UN in 2000 laid a foundation that enabled Africa to achieve extraordinary progress over the last 15 years. And the Sustainable Development Goals that recently replaced them set even more ambitious targets for creating the better world we all want.
When I talk about progress, I always start with child survival, because whether children are living or dying is such a basic indicator of a society’s success.
Since 1990, child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa has been reduced by 54 percent. That translates to 1 million fewer children who died last year compared to 25 years ago.
Meanwhile, the incidence of poverty and malnutrition is down.
This is real progress, but the Africa Rising narrative doesn’t tell the whole story about life on the continent.
African countries tend to have higher rates of inequality than countries on other continents. And despite healthy average GDP growth in the region, many countries have not shared in it. Gross inequalities exist both within countries and between countries.
Second, even with the great progress Africa has made, it still lags the rest of the world in almost every indicator.
In sub-Saharan Africa, one in 12 children will die before they turn five. This is a vast improvement compared to 25 years ago, but African children are still 12 times more likely to die than the average child in a wealthy country. And because rates of poverty and malnutrition aren’t shrinking as fast as the population is growing, the total number of people who are poor or malnourished has actually gone up since 1990.
Finally, the progress is fragile. The continent’s two largest economies, here in South Africa and in Nigeria, are facing serious economic turmoil.
To meet the goals of the SDGs, Africa needs to do more, do it faster, and make sure everybody benefits.
It won’t be easy, but I believe it can be done.
YOUTH
One topic that Nelson Mandela came back to over and over again was the power of youth.
He understood that highlighting the oppression of young people was a powerful way to explain why things must change.
I agree with Mandela about young people, and that is one reason I am optimistic about the future of this continent. Demographically, Africa is the world’s youngest continent, and its youth can be the source of a special dynamism.
By 2050, 40 percent of the world’s children will live on this continent.
Economists talk about the demographic dividend. When you have more people of working age, and fewer dependants for them to take care of, you can generate phenomenal economic growth.
But the most important thing about young people is the way their minds work. Young people are better than old people at driving innovation, because they are not locked in by the limits of the past.
When I started Microsoft in 1975 – at the age of 19 – computer science was a young field. We didn’t feel beholden to old notions about what computers could or should do. We dreamt about the next big thing.
But it wasn’t just at Microsoft. Steve Jobs was 21 when he started Apple. Mark Zuckerberg was only 19 when he created Facebook.
The African entrepreneurs driving start-up booms in the Silicon Savannahs from Joburg and Cape Town to Lagos and Nairobi are just as young – in chronological age, but also in outlook.
Nelson Mandela said: “Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”
HEALTH AND NUTRITION
When Melinda and I started our foundation 15 years ago, we asked ourselves: what are the areas of greatest opportunity? It was clear to us that investing in health was at the top of the list.
Over the last 15 years, our foundation has invested more than $9 billion (R131bn) in Africa – and we are committed to keep on investing to help Africa. In the next five years, we will invest another $5bn.
We’ve put a lot of this money into discovering and developing new and better vaccines and drugs to help prevent and treat the diseases of poverty.
The entire continent of Africa has been polio-free for two years, which puts us within reach of wiping polio from the face of the earth… forever.
The newest vaccines that protect children from two of the most devastating diseases – pneumonia and severe diarrhoea – are reaching children across Africa at the same time they’re available for children in wealthier countries.
Aids is another area where there’s been good progress
Soon, I’ll be speaking at the International Aids conference in Durban. When the global Aids community last met there in 2000, only a few thousand Africans were receiving antiretroviral drugs. Today, more than 12 million Africans are on treatment – more than a quarter of them living here in South Africa.
But the rate of new infections remains high. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 2 000 young people under the age of 24 are newly infected every single day.
The number of young people dying from HIV has increased fourfold since 1990.
There are other challenges. Almost half the people living with HIV are undiagnosed.
Millions more aren’t being treated. And millions of people who are receiving treatment aren’t able to stay on it.
Add to this the high rates of tuberculosis among people living with HIV, including here in South Africa, where TB/HIV co-infection continues to wage a devastating toll.
If we fail to act, all the hard-earned gains made in HIV in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 15 years could be reversed.
Nutrition is another critical area of focus for Africa. Nearly one third of the continent’s children suffer from malnutrition that stunts their growth and development and robs them of their physical and cognitive potential. Millions more suffer from micro-nutrient deficiencies.
While eliminating malnutrition is a complex challenge, there is a lot we already know about how to ensure that every child gets a healthy start in life.
We know that mothers and infants need good nutrition for healthy growth and brain development, and that breastfeeding protects children from life-threatening diseases like pneumonia and diarrhoea.
We also know that certain vitamins and minerals are essential for children and for women of reproductive age.
The good news is we have a growing suite of cost-effective interventions – things like cooking oil, sugar fortified with Vitamin A and like sugar and flour enriched with iron, zinc, and B vitamins.
EDUCATION
When children’s bodies and brains are healthy, the next step is an education that helps them develop the knowledge and skills to become productive contributors to society.
Improving education is incredibly hard. I have learnt this first hand through our foundation’s efforts to create better learning outcomes for primary, secondary, and university students in the US. But this hard work is incredibly important.
In Africa, as in the US, we need new thinking and new educational tools to make sure a high-quality education is available to every single child.
South Africa is blessed with some of the best universities in Africa – universities our foundation relies on as partners in important health and agricultural research.
Maintaining the quality of this country’s higher education system while expanding access to more students will not be easy. But it’s critical to South Africa’s future.
Other countries in the region will do well to follow South Africa’s example and provide the highest level university education to the largest number of qualified students.
PRODUCTIVITY
Healthy, educated young people are eager to make their way in the world. But Africa’s youth must have the economic opportunities to channel their energy and their ideas into progress.
One way to create economic opportunity is to turn agriculture, which still employs more than half the people on the continent, from a struggle for survival into a thriving business.
African farmers need better tools to avoid disasters and grow a surplus – things like seeds that can tolerate droughts, floods, pests, and disease, affordable fertiliser that includes the right mix of nutrients to replenish the soil, and easy-to-administer livestock vaccines that can prevent flocks and herds from being wiped out.
Farmers need to be connected to markets where they can buy these inputs, sell their surplus, and earn a profit they can invest not only in their family’s basic needs but also back into the farm.
This, in turn, will provide employment opportunities both on and off the farm as more prosperous farmers begin to support a range of local agribusinesses like seed dealers, trucking companies, and processing plants.
A recent report projected that more than 500 million Africans won’t have electricity in 2040. That number needs to go down.
GOVERNANCE
All of these things – advances in health, in education, in agricultural productivity, in energy – won’t happen on their own. They can only happen in the context of governments that function well enough to enable them.
A lot can be accomplished by focusing on fiscal governance and accountability. Here in South Africa, the government gets strong marks for the budget information it provides to the public. The International Budget Partnership, an independent monitoring organisation, also ranks South Africa highly for its oversight of government spending.
Because so many people in developing countries have mobile phones, tens of millions of people are storing money digitally on their phones and using their phones to make purchases, as if they were debit cards.
Governments can accelerate this digital transformation by implementing policies that encourage commercial investment, innovation, and healthy competition, by building the shared infrastructure needed to enable digital financial services to flourish, and finally by using this technology to digitise payments and improve delivery of services to citizens.
CONCLUSION
If there is one thing I’m sure of, it is this: Africa can achieve the future it aspires to.
That future depends on the people of Africa working together, across economic and social strata and across national borders, to lay a foundation so that Africa’s young people have the opportunities they deserve.
Nelson Mandela said: “Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom.”
But our duty is not merely to arouse; our duty is to invest in young people, to put in place the basic building blocks so that they can build the future.
Let’s do everything within our power right now to help them build the future that Nelson Mandela dreamt of – and the future that we will achieve together.