MARCEL MBAMALUBillionaire founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, is currently in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to meet with national and local leaders, partners, grantees, and innovators, in line with the Foundation’s development projects in Africa. The meeting, tagged Nutri-vision 2024, holds at the Congress Hall of the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, on Tuesday, 3rd September. Mr Gates will also take part in a pan-African virtual dialogue focused on addressing malnutrition.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is “a nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world.” It seeks to consolidate on ongoing collaborations with experts to drive progress in malnutrition through integrated health, agriculture, and financing solutions. The Foundation focuses on Africa-based solutions, while seeking to contribute maximally in addressing malnutrition, poverty and disease on the continent. This is the basis of collaborating with experts in African regional institutions, national governments, the private sector, non-profit organizations and local communities in 49 African countries.
According to the Foundation, its projects and commitments are “guided by the belief that every life has equal value. In developing countries, it focuses on improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty.” The Foundation takes particular note that “poor nutrition contributes to nearly half of all child deaths under age 5 and impairs the physical and mental development of millions of children. More than 1 billion women and children do not have access to the nutrition and healthy diets they need to survive and thrive. Based in Seattle, Washington, the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is led by CEO Mark Suzman, under the direction of Co-chairs Bill Gates and Melinda”. Gates tour of Nigeria has an entertainment side, as he is joined by musician, educator and humanitarian, Jon Batiste.
Major Milestones
Since being founded in 2000, the Foundation has committed enormous amounts of resources to develop and implement innovative approaches to confront hunger, disease, gender inequality, and poverty across Africa.
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On September 3, 2021, the foundation unveiled a record $922 million to tackle global nutrition and empower all women and children to have improved nutrition for healthy and productive lives. The Foundation made the announcement at the first-ever United Nations Food Systems Summit. Being the highest ever contribution, the funds are part of the over $7 billion spent since 2000 in projects that will run until 2026. Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, said during the UN Food Systems Summit that “This funding will help more people around the world get the nutrition they need to live a healthy life, and we hope it serves as an invitation for more donors, foundations, governments, and private-sector leaders to build on today’s investment with more bold commitments.”
Speaking in a similar tone, Bill Gates added: “We will continue to prioritize and invest in nutrition because it is critical to reducing preventable deaths, improving maternal and child health and building resilience for the future. While malnutrition accounts for nearly half of all child deaths, it still receives less than one percent of foreign aid—a trend that must change.”
In November 2022, Bill Gates, in his first trip to Africa since the Covid-19 pandemic, was in Nairobi where he spoke with University of Nairobi students. Announcing a new $7 billion fund to support innovations in finding solutions to health, agriculture, inequality issues, he praised the drive and optimism of young people in Kenya and across the continent. He reaffirmed the Foundation’s long-term commitment to Africa and to working directly with countries to support breakthrough solutions in these critical areas.
Bill Gates told the Kenyan students that more than $7 billion would be spent “over the next four years” through to 2026, to support African countries and institutions working to develop and implement innovative approaches to confront hunger, disease, gender inequality, and poverty.
The new commitment to support African countries was in addition to existing Gates Foundation funding to multilateral organisations like Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The resources have helped to strengthen health systems and increase access to health care in African countries, contributing to visible reductions in the rate of child deaths from diseases such as diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles.
On January 16, 2023, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also set a fresh funding record when CEO Mark Suzman announced in the Foundation’s annual letter that it would spend US$8.3 billion to address “economic turmoil, climate-related disasters, and large decreases in vaccinations for preventable infectious diseases, all of which have taken a significant toll on the world’s poorest people”. The foundation says that the 2023 budget approval, a 15% increase on the 2022 payout, puts the Foundation “on track to meet its commitment to reach an annual payout of US$9 billion by 2026”.
The funding initiative by the Foundation has been described as apt, coming just after the spike in hunger, which followed the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, estimates showed that 811 million people around the world were undernourished, and nearly half of the global population or 3 billion people did not have access to healthy food as a result of poverty. This is why undernutrition is responsible for around 50% of all child deaths globally, costing the global economy a huge $3.5 trillion per year. Yet, even with these dire estimates, recent data shows that the world will likely not achieve any nutrition indicators by 2030.
Notably, global nutrition and national budgets to nutrition in each case account for less than 1% of foreign aid and allocations worldwide, making the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s initiatives quite timely. The Foundation estimates that investing in nutrition is overly productive in the long term as it can contribute to improved productivity, “with every $1 invested in nutrition returning $16 back into the local economy.” As Chris Elias, president of the Global Delivery Division at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation notes: “With just nine years left to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, good nutrition is a driver of every global goal. That’s why improved nutrition has always been a goal of our foundation, and will continue to be.”
Dr. Marcel Mbamalu is a communication scholar, journalist and entrepreneur. He holds a Ph.D in Mass Communication from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and is the Chief Executive Officer Newstide Publications, the publishers of Prime Business Africa.
A seasoned journalist, he horned his journalism skills at The Guardian Newspaper, rising to the position of News Editor at the flagship of the Nigerian press. He has garnered multidisciplinary experience in marketing communication, public relations and media research, helping clients to deliver bespoke campaigns within Nigeria and across Africa.
He has built an expansive network in the media and has served as a media trainer for World Health Organisation (WHO) at various times in Northeast Nigeria. He has attended numerous media trainings, including the Bloomberg Financial Journalism Training and Reuters/AfDB training on Effective Coverage of Infrastructural Development of Africa.
A versatile media expert, he won the Jefferson Fellowship in 2023 as the sole Africa representative on the program. Dr Mbamalu was part of a global media team that covered the 2020 United State’s Presidential election. As Africa's sole representative in the 2023 Jefferson Fellowships, Dr Mbamalu was selected to tour the United States and Asia (Japan and Hong Kong) as part of a 12-man global team of journalists on a travel grant to report on inclusion, income gaps and migration issues between the US and Asia.
