The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, who’ll be visiting Nigeria in June, affirms in this interview that things are tending to improve in Nigeria, but at a pretty low base.

BILL GATES

Have you visited any African country?
I was in Kenya in December looking at M-PESA (a service allowing money transfers and bill paying by mobile phone, pioneered by the Safaricom Company in Kenya) - which is a phenomenal thing - and the whole way we get that into other countries and use it as the foundation for innovative financial services. That’s exciting, because the digital approach allows you to have your transaction fees super low and your accessibility super high. Although it’s going to take a while before we take full advantage of M-PESA and get it into other countries, that’s an example of something that really did happen first in Africa. There’s no real analog to that kind of digital currency yet in most other countries.
The mobile phone entrepreneur, Mo Ibrahim, has encouraged us to give more attention to governance as a key component of aid effectiveness. I was thinking about that in November, when I saw some exciting innovations in Kwara State, Nigeria where Governor Bukola Saraki, who is a physician, has pioneered a low cost insurance scheme. It’s really made rural people feel interested in their healthcare and the new clinics being built.
Governor Saraki said there is a lot of interest across Nigeria (in the initiative), but, of course, you really need a functioning government to help scale up these efforts across Nigeria and beyond. I just wondered how you see the issues of governance as relevant to your work to create sustainable development.
Well, governance is the biggest factor completely outside of our control that can make a huge difference. Certainly you have the case of Zimbabwe, where things went backwards because of mis-governance.
And yet it’s tricky for a donor - how can you help things? We fund Transparency International. We’re funding groups that work on good governance. We funded Tony Blair to go in Liberia and do some transition activities. I follow Paul Collier’s writings quite a bit, and I tend to agree with him that you’ve got to think about governance. But we’re an actor outside the country. Now if you improve health and you improve agricultural productivity that tends to help with governance. Bad governance and bad circumstances are intertwined. They tend to reinforce each other. When you get good governance, it makes a huge difference, and Africa has some good examples right now.
In our work in Nigeria, we’re always wondering: will the government get better or worse? In a thing like polio, Nigeria is the last place in Africa where you have significant disease transmission.

So you think that sustainable development is a tapestry of many threads, and you’re trying to use the ones that you’re most expert in or can do the most in?
That’s right. Health and agriculture and financial services are the ones we’ve put the most money into. We put some into governance and I wish I knew better how to map resources into that. When South African President Jacob Zuma took power, we didn’t know what he would do on AIDS. I met with him in December, and I was very pleased with his openness and his energy. We should be smarter about governance, but there will still be an element of luck involved as well.

Do you think Africa can benefit from innovations in this area - teaching materials distributed through mobile devices, and that sort of thing?
Sometimes people don’t think about Africa in connection with technologies, but it seems to me there are a lot of prospects there. Well, there are two things we need to do for Africa to get online learning to work. One is to get Internet coverage to be broader and cheaper - and it is improving in Africa. But Africa is the least connected continent by any measure you look at.
The second is to get this online learning thing working for the world as a whole, and we’re at a very early stage on this. The ideal would be to take the training to do various jobs related to treating AIDS,   providing AIDS drugs, drawing blood, being a community worker or pharmacist. If you could have all that great training online and interactive, your ability to create trained personnel - your capacity - would go up a lot more easily than it does today. So I do think there’s a role for online learning in Africa.

Let me finish up by asking you if there are any other things that you’d like to say specifically about Africa?
I’m optimistic about Africa. Part of my being full-time at the foundation means I get to Africa at least once a year and see new things. My next trip will be in June. I’ll certainly go to Nigeria. I don’t know where else I’ll go. Innovation that’s done in Africa and other places can make a big difference. I talk about innovation in Africa and agricultural work being done up in Nairobi. The other thing that was stunning for me - it was fantastic - was the University of Kwazulu-Natal, where the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Bruce Walker (who directs the HIV Pathogenesis Program) are making sure funds are going to help create great scientists and great collaborative work there. So getting success stories out about Africa is particularly important, because when you just hear the current statistics it can be a little depressing. But the trend line is positive enough and there’s enough cool things like M-PESA that, hopefully, as I’m doing new annual letters and being online, the positive stories will get out there more.

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