Bill Gates Foundation,To Benefits Africa Greatly
By Staff Writer
Number of polio cases in Nigeria could be down to zero in 2015 and eventually declared free of the disease in 2018, even though a national eradication campaign has had to contend with an insurgency in the north, Bill Gates said.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation support the global initiative to wipe out the disease which includes campaigns in Nigeria, where the rate of crippling virus is highest in Africa with 53 polio cases reported in 2013, compared to122 in 2012.
Gates said despite of all the challenges up in northern Nigeria, acts of violence targeting vaccination workers and the distraction of upcoming elections next years, the foundation will achieve its goal.
"Despite all that, we've got by far the lowest numbers of cases ever," he said. "We hope by the end of next year we'd be at zero." He added that if there were no more cases for three years after that, Nigeria could be certified clear in 2018.
"We've got a pretty optimistic view of what can happen in Africa in those two areas," he said before his trip to Ethiopia, a nation stricken by famine 30 years ago but which has doubled farm output in the last eight years,” Microsoft’s founder and CEO and philanthropist said last week ahead of his awarding oo honorary degree ‘for his efforts to help African students benefit from technology and his works’, at the University of Addis Ababa (AAU) on development in Africa, mainly in health and agriculture on Thursday July 24.
One of his major programmes is the fight against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that infects more than 200 million people a year and kills more than 600,000 people with nine out of 10 deaths being in Africa.
Gates said the Anti-Malaria Campaign involved promoting sleeping under bed nets, protecting homes with insecticide sprays and using the artemisinin drug in treatment to bring down fatalities.
"On the negative side, we have an emergence of new species of mosquitoes resistant to insecticides and that can take away the very best drug tool we have right now," he said. “However there are efforts to contain this problem from spreading.”
Bill and Melinda Foundation, has also contributed in improving Agriculture in Africa as the primary backer of the eight-year-old Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, that supports small-scale farmers with projects ranging from improving seed varieties to increasing soil fertility.
Productivity in Africa per hectare where most farmers till small plots is only about a fifth that of the United States and Europe, where farms are far bigger and better equipped.
He said global research has often focused on improving rice, wheat and maize, while popular African staples like sorghum, cassava and millet have received less attention and that his foundation is seeking to redress some of that imbalance.
“Bringing down fertilizer prices, better understanding of soils and improving credit systems are vital to boosting output in Africa, at the same time making sure knowledge and expertise reached small scale farmers in remote areas is also very valuable,” Gates said.
The foundation also supports Digital Green project, aimed at helping small scale farmers exchange knowledge amongst them through video clips that could be watched on smart-phones, with the programme being active in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Ghana.
He said this encouraged better adoption of new practices because farmers were listening "to somebody speaking local dialect and working on the same problem they are."
He added that he was also backing "old school" projects operating in Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Malawi, using radio to spread better techniques.
However, he said while expertise extension programmes were proving effective in countries like Ethiopia,it is not same in other countries.
"There are a lot of countries in Africa where the extension system is hardly working at all, and there we work with the government to improve that."