US billionaire and the Chair, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, has said that Nigeria’s health budget is too small to tackle the health challenges facing the country.
He stated that the health budgets will be under incredible pressure, particularly with the aid cuts, adding that “there will be less money for health in Nigeria next year than this year.”
In an interview with journalists yesterday in Lagos, which was a sideline for the first-ever Goalkeepers event by the Gates Foundation in Nigeria, Bill Gates observed that the low funding for health was part of the reasons Nigeria has the second-highest maternal and child mortality rate in the world.
He said, “The amount of money Nigeria spends on healthcare is very, very small. So I don’t know why you would have expected that number to go down. If a mother delivers at home, there are certain complications that you can’t solve.
“What countries like India do is that they drive delivery into centres where they can give C-sections, but that takes money. So in northern Nigeria, about half the births are at home, and even the ones that aren’t at home, many of those centres can’t do C-sections. So, unfortunately, you’re going to have a maternal mortality problem because of that.”
Gates noted that the foundation is creating low-cost tools like an ultrasound scanning device that will identify which deliveries are going to be high-risk.
“So the 10 per cent it identifies as high-risk, hopefully you can take them on to a medical facility, even though that might not be easy, and the other 90 per cent you can stay in the community.
“Our bleeding intervention, where we had a trial that was so impactful that it was stopped early. There’s actually an amazing doctor at the hospital who ran that study, and it is just an incredible thing because this is cheap.”
Gates pointed out that in almost every African country, there will be less money, which will lead to a big increase in deaths.
He stated that the foundation has a very aggressive goal to ensure that children born here in Nigeria have every equal opportunity to a child born in whatever the richest country in the world.
“I think we can make a lot of progress, even though in the near term, it’s an awful situation that the aid budgets are being cut significantly, and in some cases without any sort of warning at all. And that’s tragic.
“I will advocate that the cuts be minimised or that we get them restored when we can. But, you know, I won’t be able to get them.”
On whether the Gates Foundation is willing to bridge the funding gap created by the US aid cuts in Nigeria, Gates said, “There’s nobody who can match that U.S. government money. And the European money is all coming down. We have, like, a 40% decrease from Germany, from the U.K. In their case, it’s less ideological and more to do with just getting money for Ukraine or ageing society.
“Well, the problem with the Gates Foundation is that we don’t have some special bucket of money. We spend more every year, and all my money will be spent. And so no matter what the other people do, it’s the same amount of money. If they increase, I’ll still spend my money. If they disappear, I’ll still spend my money. So my money is not extra money.
“Nigeria mobilised an extra $200 million, but that’s not anywhere close to the money that’s disappearing. And you’re yet to see what happens when UNICEF gets cut, and Gavi gets cut, and Global Fund gets cut. So people don’t like speaking up about it, but this is terrible.”
