By Juliet Jacob Ochenje
Microsoft founder and global philanthropist, Bill Gates, has lamented that 90 percent of Nigerian women do not have access to proper medical assistance during child birth and end up having their babies unassisted at home.
Speaking at the Unleash Africa’s Innovative Future forum in Lagos on Wednesday, Gates noted that in some states, women who are giving birth do not have access to life saving care when they develop complications in the process.
He said, ”If you look across the country, a mother’s chance of surviving a child birth or chance for a child growing up healthy varies and are quite dramatic.”
To address this problem, he called for more innovation in health care, as well as improved education, especially for women. Gates also called for application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving healthcare services in Nigeria.
”The inequities of location, gender, these are opportunities to really understand what those are and change them. Like education, the women education varies a lot. In fact, there are places where the majority of women don’t get great education, so these is an imperative to take this advances, whether is AI or anything we are doing, and apply this in health and education.
“And that’s why our foundation is having an opportunity in working with great partners here, and certainly up till the pandemic, we were making great progress. Now we see that progress can resume, and so AI is going to be used for things like designing malaria drugs,” the philanthropist said.
He added: “With AI, our foundation just recently put out a challenge to ask for ideas about using AI to reduce inequities and we reached out and got 1300 proposals and half of those came from Africa, and on my next visit back to the continent which will be in October in Senegal, we will have a chance to celebrate winners of that contest that look very promising, so we can accelerate progress in this key areas.”
