Bill Gates: Health Innovations Succeeding In Africa

Updated 6:45pm

Innovations in the last decade have led to dramatic improvements in the fights against AIDS, famine, and meningitis in Africa, Bill Gates said at Stanford Wednesday.

Outlining the successes of new technologies on the African continent, Gates said that his foundation has “made progress and inspired others,” while other organizations have “given up in frustration over the challenges of improving health in Africa.”

Gates, who just returned from Ethiopia and Zambia, said he was thrilled to come to Stanford and see science research being focused on the needs of the poor.

“I got through school without having a sense of how the poorest in the world live,” he said. Gates highlighted three big innovations that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have helped advance in the last decade—a meningitis vaccine, an AIDS-combating circumcision tool, and a bag that helps West African farmers save their valuable bean crops.

Meningitis is fatal to 10 to 20 percent of Africans who contract it, Gates said. There is a whole swatch of African countries in the “Meningitis Belt” that are particularly vulnerable during seasons that occur every two or three years.

After 10 years of research, Indian vaccine producer Serum is now producing a vaccine that has been distributed to 50 million Africans. The disease is now on the steady decline, and Gates said he hopes it will be entirely eradicated in that region of Africa by midcentury. He said the vaccine cost $30 million to develop and that the marginal cost today is very low.

“We are optimistic that [the vaccine] will get rid of that plague altogether,” he said.

Perhaps the most prevalent serious disease in Africa is AIDS, however. In the southern half of Africa, nearly 20 percent of all people have AIDS. The Gates Foundation spends $300 million annually trying to find a vaccine, but in the meantime, they’ve found ways to help reduce the number of annual infections from three million annually to two million.

“It’s still kind of a horrific number,” he said.

One big innovation that the Gates Foundation has distributed is the Shang Ring, which cuts the amount of time a surgeon needs to perform a circumcision from 30 minutes to only a few. Circumcisions reduce the likelihood of males catching HIV by 60 percent, Gates said.

Finally, Gates said that cowpeas in West Africa are a major crop, but are often wasted due to weevil infestations. A Gates Foundation-funded project led to the development of a special bag, made of three layers of plastic, that allows farmers to certify their crop as weevil-free because the pests are kept out. As a result, said Gates, 1.7 million households will increase their annual income by 30 percent, or $130.

“If we can get innovators to care about these problems, and governments to stay generous,” he said, then you can improve the human condition.

The talk, “Getting Better: A View from Africa,” was held at Cubberly Auditorium and included a Q&A with students and internet viewers via Twitter.