I am inspired by the lengths to which women go for the sake of their kids

At exactly 3.12 pm on Tuesday, May 17, we are ushered into the room where Mrs Melinda Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Dr Chris Elias, president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are waiting. We have only 40 minutes, because there is another group waiting to speak with her.

Mrs Gates has been in this room for the better part of the day. According to her handlers, she has been meeting with different people, including beneficiaries of her projects, on the sidelines of the 4th Women Deliver Global Conference that ends  on Thursday in Copenhagen, Denmark.

She is wearing a light blue suit and dark blue suède wedges, a silver watch on her left hand and two bangles on her right hand.

“Hello, my name is Melinda Gates,” she introduces herself, in what is perhaps normal to her,  but which has a profound on  the addressed. This is Melinda Gates. She completes it with a firm handshake.

“There are drinks here, feel free to pick what you like,” Mrs Gates says, walking towards a side table. She  pours herself some Coca-Cola in a glass, then adds enough ice cubes to fill it to the brim. 

She sits across from me at the table, with Mr Elias on her left and a journalist from Tanzania on her right. She is surrounded by six journalists from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and three people from her organisation.

She settles in her chair, arranges her notes in front her and places a black pen on top, signalling that she is ready for  the exclusive interview.

Q. Today you announced a $80 million (Sh8 billion) commitment to “close gender data gaps” and “accelerate progress for women and girls”. Why is this important?

We have very little data. We need to build a data system instead of waiting every three to five years to see how we are doing in family planning. The data will let us know what access to contraceptive is like, what supply is like, which contraceptives women

use and whether they were coerced into using them. We can measure these indicators every six months to know which countries are on track, and to know the areas in which to ask our partners for more funding, whether in West Africa, Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda.

Q. What sort of data will you be looking for?

We will look at data on unpaid work, income, family planning, violence, energy sources, land ownership, agriculture, and how women are spending their time, among other indicators. We will work with our partners and the UN Women, the implementers of the grant, and they will work with the national statistics offices in the different countries.

Q The Gates Foundation is very passionate about vaccination against diseases such as polio and the current malaria vaccine under development (it’s known as RTS,S and is being developed by PATH). However, vaccination drives in Kenya, including the one this week against measles and rubella, as well as the earlier one for tetanus, face opposition, especially from the Catholic Church due to concerns that the tetanus vaccines can cause infertility in women. As a Catholic mother, what are your thoughts on this?

I have my own children vaccinated. I couldn’t advocate more strongly that you have your child vaccinated too (laughs). They are 100 per cent safe; they are quality-tested around the world and are used by women and men around the world. They save lives.

Anybody who says anything against vaccines is not being truthful and that makes me angry (laughs).

(Lifts her left index finger) I am a Catholic and I absolutely have my children vaccinated and would recommend that every  parent in  the world do the same. Vaccination is a very different thing from contraceptives, and every child should be vaccinated.

There is no moral reason not to do it. In fact, there is a moral imperative to do it. If you are a parent, you want good things for your children, you want them to grow up safe.

Chris Elias: When that came up last year, the Ministry of Health responded to the reactions and said those rumours were dangerous and result in the loss of children’s lives.

Of the vaccines that Kenya uses, many are provided through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) and procured by the United Nations Children’s Fund’s supply division, which applies the highest quality standards. Those are dangerous rumours about  life-saving products.

Q. You visited Tanzania last year; what lessons did you learn from the community you interacted with?

I stayed with a Maasai family with my eldest daughter and I learnt many things from them. Such as how difficult it is to live in circumstances with no water. At the birth of their first son, Robert, they had a marital crisis,  which I think most marriages have  at some point, if we are to be honest about it. But when the husband came home, the wife had packed her bags,  and had the newborn in her arms. He loved her but she said: “You brought me to this place with no water and I have been going to fetch water every day. But I can’t nurse our son and keep him healthy and still fetch water.

She asked him to start carrying the water, which he did for a while, but that made him be stigmatised by the community. But they understood what women go through when fetching water. When we visited later, we found four water points had been constructed, which are closer to the homestead.

Q. What is your take on natural versus modern family planning methods? Some churches, for instance, oppose the modern methods and ask women to use only natural methods.

I believe in modern contraceptives. But women should make their own choice, because women use different contraceptives for a certain period and then opt for another. As a foundation, our job is to make sure there are as many options as possible on the table for women. Women want different options.

Like the church, we all share a common mission of social justice. The way we do it is by offering contraceptives so that people can plan and space their children and have the best chance of lifting themselves out of poverty.

Q. Most panels in the conference are dominated by women, with very few men involved. Are you doing anything to include more men in the discussions?

There have to be boys and girls, men and women furthering the agenda for women. They have to be part of that conversation too. Something that makes me so enthused is that, most of the votes in signing the Sustainable Development Goals came from men. There are a few women, but it’s the men who make those decisions. Many of them are enlightened men who grew up as enlightened boys, but also because they have daughters. They ask: “How do we make sure that all girls always come up?”

Our foundation deals with issues relating to health, decision-making and economic activities, which also include agriculture.

Q. What drives you?

When you meet people and see the disparity and the burden women bear. If you don’t empower them, you don’t empower their families. What inspires me is the women I meet on the ground, the unbelievable lengths they would go to for their children. It’s about the next generation; they invest in their education.

Q. What  is your typical day like; how do you relax?

(Breaks into hearty laughter) At home or on the road? I still have three kids, one at college and two teenagers. Bill and I try to be home for dinner because I believe family dinners are so important.

Then to unwind, I love to exercise.  We live in the north-west so I love to be outdoors, I love to be out on my kayak, or on my bicycle, I love to jog. Bill and I like to watch movies so we try to take time out on weekends to go to the movies.

Q: What keeps you up at night?

(Laughs) Besides my kids? I have two teenagers. (Laughs) If we are working in an area and I feel as if we don’t know as much as we need to know. Around the time we were at the family planning summit in London, I was up many nights worrying about whether we were setting the right goals, whether we would get our partners on board, whether we were going to get the funding we needed to get things going. I had some late nights worrying then, and even after that, until we made the data system, but we — Chris and I — and the team still felt we didn’t just know enough.

But any new area that we go into as a foundation, and where I feel we don’t quite have our hands on things – that keeps me up at night. Because it’s not just our own money; we are also investing Warren Buffet’s money as well as our partners’, besides asking governments to also invest, so those are big responsibilities.

Q: Which projects are you particularly proud of that did surprisingly better that you had anticipated?

Our foundation is incredibly pleased that we are on the last kilometre of the anti-polio fight and that is, you know (knocks the table twice) knock on wood. That is a huge, ambitious project. Chris and his team run it. To say that we are where we are now, wow! There’s still work to be done, fingers crossed for Pakistan but seeing what’s possible and what we can build from that programme, the data systems, the partners, us coming together, a real strategy. The fact that we haven’t seen any polio in the continent of Africa now in over a year, wow! (smiles)

Chris:  It’s been 21 months.

Melinda: Yes, 21 months.

Chris: In a year-and-a-half. If there are no more cases, Africa will be certified polio-free.

Melinda: That gives us the drive that it can be done. In the case of other diseases like malaria, we can be really ambitious and borrow a lot from the  lessons learnt with regard to the anti polio campaign.

Q: What are your next projects?

We are looking at adolescents’ reproductive health and how to reach those girls, especially those under pressure to have their first child (maybe due to early marriage); as you know it’s horrific to have a child at 14.  If we can help her delay the first pregnancy in any way and educate her about her body, her cycle and what options are available. We can do that covertly. Give her a safe place to learn about her body. Even if she can’t delay the first birth for a long time, at least let her space the second and third children.

Thus the chances of her not dying in childbirth [are reduced], and her children can grow up and be healthier. This is the place the family planning community can go to next.

The interview ended at 3.56pm with a photo session with the journalists and a hearty “Goodbye and thank you for the interesting questions,” from Mrs Gates.

Her communication team intimates that she has her bags packed ready  for a visit to Kenya. They decline to give any details, only saying it will be soon.