ON A MISSION

MELINDA GATES could have settled for a life of luxury. Instead, as one half of one of the world’s wealthiest couples, she’s decided to do what she’s best at: CHANGING THE WORLD, ONE WOMAN AT A TIME

When Melinda Gates had three small children (her youngest is now 16), she noticed she was always the last one standing – and cleaning – in the kitchen after dinner. How did it happen? Her spouse (that’d be Microsoft founder Bill Gates) was a fair-minded partner; he’d even recently caused a kerfuffle at their daughter Jennifer’s preschool when he started dropping her off two days a week, obliterating every other father’s excuse for not being there.

Gates, an early pioneer in the male-dominated tech industry (she was a Microsoft product manager when she met Bill and initially turned him down), needed a hack for this domestic conundrum. “Finally I came up with this rule: nobody leaves the kitchen until Mum leaves the kitchen,” says Gates. “Well, guess what? Everybody asks, ‘What can I do?’ so they can get out of the kitchen. So I got out 15 minutes sooner and I was a lot happier.”

Which begs the question: if a hyper-wealthy American woman has to negotiate for 15 minutes a day, what’s at stake for women in Africa, where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has worked to enable equality since 2000?

Essentially, it’s the same universal debate, different continent (though the challenges are, of course, far more dramatic for African women in poverty). Gates’ travels abroad (she first visited Africa in 1993) have informed her own sense of household parity because the challenges African and American women face aren’t so different. On a recent trip, she asked several African couples to sort a stack of cards, each card representing a task the women, and the men, did to maintain the farm or the home. “The more we sat there, the more outraged [the women] became. They had about 45 on their side and the men had maybe five… At first, there were a lot of chuckles from the men. They couldn’t believe they’d been doing so little.” Eventually, Gates says, these uncomfortable moments of self-awareness lead to change.

In an effort to spread that awareness worldwide, the Gates Foundation released their second Goalkeepers Data Report, a study of global progress and challenges designed to keep the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) on track annually until the 2030 deadline. This year, the

Goalkeepers Report focuses on young people, particularly in Africa where nearly 60 per cent of the continent’s inhabitants are under the age of 25 (compared to 27 per cent in Europe). The Report contends that if we invest in this human capital now, specifically in their health and education, we unlock great potential for progress: “Across subsaharan Africa, these investments could increase the size of the economy by nearly 90 per cent by 2050, making it much more likely that the poorest countries can break through their stagnation and follow the path of China and India.”

Though the focus of the Report is on youth, gender equality (one of the UN’S SDGS) is a through-line. At home, Gates still works to make sure both parents contribute their share. Some tasks Bill “wasn’t so excited about [taking over]… but you learn to push through those moments. What we realise is we’re both happier and we’re both more engaged in the family. We can see the kids thriving and we know it’s because of both of us, not because, you know, Mum put in her time and Dad put in less.”

Africa and its sizeable problems can seem impossible to solve and too far away to matter. But Gates says that if you talk to parents in Africa, from its poorest nation to its richest city, their dreams for their children are like anyone else’s: they want highquality education and economic opportunity, and the resources are there to actualise these goals. In Africa, there are now almost the same amount of girls in school as boys, giving youth the potential to transform the continent in the future. And if their health and education are seen as priorities, poverty in Africa will be reduced, as will severe climate change, political instability, violence and gender inequality. This is the value of investing in human capital in addition to physical infrastructure. Data shows there’s a direct relationship between health and education levels, and per capita GDP. “So many people have this old view of Africa,” says Gates. “When you’re on the ground, the energy and ingenuity are palpable. It’s an amazing place and with the right investments, they’re going to lift themselves up completely.”

When asked what it means to be a feminist in 2018, Gates answers, “It means giving every woman on the planet their voice.” In a previous era, any woman advancing up the ranks in politics or business couldn’t always keep that door open for other women to follow, but today, “the young feminists I’m meeting are interested in empowering everybody, not just themselves”. It’s not enough to have one woman on a board of a business, “but if you put three women on a 10-person board, things start to change”.

The lessons from the field are always close for Gates. “I’d be flying home from Africa thinking, ‘Why wouldn’t this woman have this?’ or, ‘Why isn’t she empowered in this way?’ but I had to turn the questions back on my country and say, ‘How far have we really come in the United States?’”

In Seattle, near Microsoft’s headquarters, Gates is funding women-led businesses through Pivotal Ventures, the investment and incubation company she founded in 2015. Supplying capital is a way to help balance the extremely tipped scales. According to Gates, “40 per cent of venture capital funding goes to men who graduated from Harvard and Stanford, while less than 0.05 per cent goes to Africanamerican women.”

Is it too late to rectify the disparity? The key is more womencentric networks. “Men have these natural-born networks,” she says, depending on where they graduated from or their first job, but women must create them, too. “Surround yourself with people who believe in you and will help you get where you want to go,” she says. “Build a network of good people who will be with you for a long time.”

Through the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic initiative started by the Gates, along with Warren Buffett, the Gates promise to give away the majority of their [US] $90 billion-plus in their lifetimes, leaving only a small fraction of their wealth to their three children.

For all of the efforts, Gates insists it’s not their intention or goal to replace the role of governments. “What a foundation can do is be a catalytic wedge,” she says. “We can find innovations, take risks that a government sometimes can’t take and figure out what works and go to governments to scale it up.” She praises France, Norway, England and Germany as leaders on the path towards Africa’s upward mobility. “Leadership does matter,” says Gates. “We have to keep beating the drum so our message is heard.”

Strong leadership is nothing without networks of knowledge and power shared between women. Gates remembers dining with a group of African businesswomen and thinking afterwards, “There’s nothing they couldn’t do. Not a single thing. They know working together is what it’ll take to lift everybody up. No single one of us can do it by ourselves. We’re stronger together.” E