Microsoft founder extols the UAE’s generosity
▶ James Langton talks to the Microsoft billionaire who says the UAE’s backing for causes such as fighting malaria and polio is helping to achieve 2030 goals
The philanthropist Bill Gates thanked the UAE for its generosity in working to stamp out deadly diseases and cut world poverty.
Mr Gates was speaking on the eve of the launch of the 2018
Goalkeepers Report, produced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This measures the progress made in meeting targets for sustainable development by 2030 set by the UN three years ago.
In an interview with The
National, Mr Gates said the foundation was “extremely thankful for the generosity of the UAE, including the Ruling Family, the government and a lot of organisations there”.
He said the UAE’s support was crucial not only because of the large sums of money it committed to disease elimination and vaccination programmes, but because its strong regional role meant it could win the support of other governments.
He gave the examples of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the UAE has been active in vaccination campaigns to eliminate the last clusters of polio in remote tribal regions.
Mr Gates said there had been efforts to work with the entire region when it came to issues like the polio campaign.
He said the “strong relationships both up into Pakistan and Afghanistan, and relationships going down into some of the countries in Africa have been very helpful in getting to religious leaders and getting the focus from the political leaders on these health issues”.
With the Gates Foundation encouraging Middle East governments to take leadership roles in fighting world poverty, “the UAE has been particularly strong in this”, Mr Gates said.
This is the second Goalkeepers report, with the name referring to public and private sector leaders who are committed to eliminating poverty and hunger, achieving better health and education, providing clean and cheaper energy and improving the environment.
The UN has set 17 goals in these areas, and others, including gender equality and water quality, that it wants to achieve by 2030.
This year’s report, released to coincide with the opening of the UN General Assembly in New York yesterday, measures progress made so far and assesses the probability that these goals will be met.
There is a particular focus on Africa where the Gates Foundation invested more than $15 billion (Dh55bn) and plans to spend even more in the future.
With the highest percentage of young people in the world, what happens to them “will be the single biggest determinant of whether the world makes progress towards the [UN’s] Sustainable Development Goals – that is, whether life on this planet keeps getting better”, the report states.
Large-scale investment in the right areas already led to historic reductions in global poverty over the past 30 years, the foundation says, from China and India to, most recently, Ethiopia.
It gives evidence showing that the number of people living in extreme poverty – meaning they survive on less than $2 a day – fell from one in three of the world population in 1990 to less than one in 10 by last year.
Over the past 20 years, that represents a billion people, Mr Gates said, while population growth, another measure of improved living standards, is largely flat.
But the overall trend conceals significant regional variations, especially in Africa and developing countries.
“If you only take Africa, even though it’s only 14 per cent of the population of the world, it’s 24 per cent of the births already,” Mr Gates said.
“Over the century, it lights up and becomes half of the births. So, you actually have a lot of population growth in Africa, even though [for] the globe as a whole, the growth isn’t that dramatic.”
Of the 10 countries projected to be the world’s poorest by the middle of this century, all are in Africa. More than six in 10 of those living in the worst poverty will be Africans.
In Nigeria, the population numbers will explode from 190 million today to 429 million by 2050. More than 150 million of these will be living in extreme poverty. The report concludes that investing in human capital in these countries could boost their economies by 90 per cent, creating political and economic stability and stemming the flow of mass migration.
Q
How is the world doing? A look at the numbers
A
Poverty Nearly two billion people lived in extreme poverty in 1990, meaning their income was less than $1.90 a day. A further three billion survived on $3.20 daily. The lower income group has now fallen to 700 million.
In South Asia the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than three quarters by 2016. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, the numbers have increased, from about 700 million in 1990 to over a billion today.
Childhood diseases Targets for vaccinating children are well on their way to being met. This is in line with the UN’s 2030 global goals, and vaccination rates have risen steadily since 2000. At the turn of the century only one in 100 children received full protection against pneumococcal disease, an infection which can lead to pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis. Today, more than half of children are vaccinated against this. But there are still significant gaps – five states in Sub-Saharan Africa are still well below that number, and yearly vaccination rates can often be unstable, dropping as well as rising from year to year.
Gender equality For the first time, the foundation’s annual report measures unpaid domestic work and care work, which typically falls to women, as a way of assessing gender equality. This work ranges from fetching wood and water to caring for children, the elderly and the sick. It concludes that in 28 countries, 88 per cent of women saw their earnings decline as a result of these unpaid tasks. Worldwide it means women between 25 and 34 are 22 per cent more likely to be extremely poor than men in the same age group.
There is a particular focus on Africa where the Gates Foundation invested more than $15 billion
Maternal and child deaths The UN’s target is to cut maternal deaths to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030. In 1990, about 297 of every 100,000 women died in childbirth. Those numbers have been cut by half but may still fall short of the UN goal for 2030.
For newborns, the UN set out to reduce the number of infant deaths to 12 of every 1,000 live births for babies and 24 deaths for every 1,000 among the under fives.
New vaccines and substantial efforts to inoculate children by last year more than halved the rate of 87 deaths for 100,000 live births in 1990, but this will probably decline merely another 30 per cent by 2030.
Malaria As with polio, this is an area where the UAE has made a significant contribution. Last September, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, made an Dh18m pledge to fight the disease.
But while polio is well on the way to being eliminated, malaria, in the words of the Gates Foundation, is “at a crossroads”. Cases of malaria surged to 40 per 1,000 people only over a decade ago but declined to 29 per 1,000 today. The goal of nine out of 1,000 by 2030 can be reached and even bettered, the foundation says, with better surveillance of disease patterns and next-generation bed nets. But without the right measures, infections could return to former levels.
Sanitation In 1990 nearly six out of 10 people in the world lacked proper sanitation. Today, that number is three in 10. The goal of the UN is to cut this further to 22 per cent by 2030. The foundation says more improvement will come from better water treatment and sewage collection, but also from a new generation of toilets which can kill pathogens in waste but do not need to be connected to a sewer.
Money Not having a bank account or access to financial services is a major obstacle in the way of many people to breaking free from poverty. New mobile technologies have transformed this problem. Although only 37 per cent of people had access to financial services in 2007, today it is nearly 70 per cent. By 2030, the goal is for this to rise to more than 90 per cent. There remains a significant gap between men and women – about 7 per cent worldwide – which has remained unchanged in this period and which in some countries is much wider. “If women and men aren’t included equally ... inequality will grow instead of shrinking, and countries will fall short of their economic potential,” the Gates Foundation said.