How Bill and Melinda Gates group is fighting gender gap

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's director for Africa Oumar Seydi talked to the Star about his journey and the challenges Africa faces in achieving development.

You joined the foundation in February this year. Tell us about your background.

I’ve been a private sector person for most of my life. Before I joined the foundation, I worked for the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation as regional director for sub-Saharan Africa based in Nairobi for the last six years.

I also worked for Usaid in Senegal, my home country, and for Citibank.

My background is both pure private sector and private sector development, before I now moved into what I call the real deal, the forefront of development. This is where your intervention can make somebody survive and strive. Think about vaccines, the Gates Foundation is one of the main funders of the Gavi Alliance.

So now I’ve moved to Johannesburg, from where I run the foundation's activities for Africa.

In Kenya, HIV, vaccines and malaria programmes are heavily donor-driven. How can the private sector step up?

Obviously, when you’re trying to set up primary healthcare, you can’t do without the public sector because this is where you’re going deep into the country.

But the private sector brings efficiency.

We encourage the private sector to also come up with clinics' pricing structure such that those who have more pay more and those with less pay less because there are schemes like that. It makes it possible for Kenyans to stop going to places like India for medical services.

In past in Africa, some NGOs have been accused of disempowering people. How does the foundation operate differently?

 Let me say a few words about our model. We are not implementers. The foundation channels all funding through third parties who allow us to implement. For instance, we work through Global Fund and Gavi, and make sure we know they can channel the money, then we fund them to do it.

Now when I think of the biggest health NGO in Africa, that is Amref, we do our homework to make sure they can extend our reach to the last mile and then we fund them. Otherwise, we would have had like 24 offices on the continent. We only have three, to be able to understand what the issues are and to support entities that can implement for us.

The 2019 Goalkeepers Report lays strong emphasis on women. Why so?

The two main factors that have been highlighted. One is geography, meaning the place you were born determines to a large extent how your future will be, more than any other factor.

The second is, regardless of where you were born, if you are woman, you have it a little it harder than your male counterparts.

In fact, the gap grows, from doing unpaid work — when you go to a family where everybody is gathered, it’s the women cleaning everything when the brothers are sitting, probably doing their homework. So that gives the woman a disadvantage compared to the man.

And also when you go to the workforce, there is a gap of 24 per cent. But we also know in development when you have a scheme where a woman can take a loan, they tend to be more reliable in reimbursing that loan and they tend to spend that money in the household.

So the woman is a very important actor in development, that’s proven. And this is the reason with reports like this, we are trying to sensitise people that the woman has been disadvantaged all these years and that also continues.

Our fourth goal is to inspire people to take action in their communities. You know people don’t talk about these things because they probably don’t know. 

How does family planning fit into this?

Our family planning argument is actually an economic argument. If you can space your births, you can have fewer children to take care of, they become healthier, and in the long run, they fare better than those who are on the other side.

Family planning brings health and economic benefits and allows us to reduce the cycle of poverty in our countries. 

The gender gap widens mostly at adolescence, where the teens may not have access to contraception. What other ways can we use to narrow the gap?

Sometimes it’s bias. Because data shows that when women and men are doing the same job, the man is paid more.

You also see some families that can’t wait to have a boy and take them to school. You have a class where people do science. You have 20 of them you ask how many girls do you have, it’s six.  

So all of those biases exist in our society. But when you have a report like that, it raises awareness so that we can also take action beginning at home.

So this is not necessarily the government’s job. It’s our job to reduce that bias and to give opportunity to the woman.