Why Gates’ billions won’t save Africa

Bill Gates – the world’s second richest person and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – announced that a significant portion of his nearly $200bn fortune would be directed towards improving primary healthcare and education across Africa over the next two decades, but this won’t save the continent, writes Tafi Mhaka in an Al Jazeera analysis. He says this extraordinary philanthropic pledge is expected to fulfil a commitment Gates made on 8 May to donate ‘virtually all’ of his wealth before the Gates Foundation permanently closes on 31 December 2045. ‘The Gates Foundation has operated in Africa for more than two decades, primarily in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. Over the years, it has funded a range of programmes in areas such as nutrition, healthcare, agriculture, water and sanitation, gender equality and financial inclusion. In agriculture alone, it has spent about $6bn on development initiatives. Despite this substantial investment, the foundation’s efforts have been the subject of widespread criticism both in Africa and internationally.’ Mhaka notes that in particular, serious concerns have been raised about the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of the foundation’s agricultural interventions – especially the Green Revolution model it has promoted through AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

'Co-founded in 2006 by the Rockefeller and Gates foundations, AGRA aimed to improve food security and reduce poverty for 30m smallholder households in 11 sub-Saharan African countries by 2021. Nineteen years on, the agricultural transformation Gates envisioned – driven by American capital and know-how – has failed to materialise.’ He says in the Al Jazeera analysis that experts argue that the Green Revolution model has not only fallen short on alleviating hunger and poverty but may in fact also be exacerbating both. ‘At the core of the Green Revolution, past and present, is a belief in the supremacy of Western science and innovation. This worldview justifies the transfer of proprietary technologies to developing countries while simultaneously devaluing local knowledge systems and Indigenous expertise. Despite its rhetorical commitment to equity, the Gates Foundation often prioritises and financially benefits researchers, pharmaceutical firms and agritech corporations in the West far more than the smallholder farmers and local specialists it claims to serve. Kenyan agroecologist Celestine Otieno has described this model as “food slavery” and a “second phase of colonisation”.’  Meanwhile, Mhaka points out that the foundation’s global health programmes have also drawn criticism for promoting technical, apolitical solutions that ignore the deeply rooted historical and political determinants of health inequity.

‘Just as troubling is the fact that many of these interventions are implemented in poor communities with minimal transparency or local accountability. All of the African countries working with the Gates Foundation continue to face the enduring problems associated with foreign-designed economic interventions and chronic dependence on aid. South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria, for instance, are all contending with the fallout from United States President Donald Trump’s cuts to the US Agency for International Development. Still, Gates’s philanthropy is only one piece of a much larger, more entrenched problem.’ Mhaka states no amount of aid can compensate for the absence of visionary, ethical and accountable leadership – or the political instability that plagues parts of the continent. ‘In this vacuum, figures like Gates step in. But these interventions can be politically expedient and risk concealing deeper systemic dysfunction. He believes that what many African states urgently need is not another influx of Western money but a radical overhaul of governance.’ Indeed, Gates’s contributions may paradoxically help prop up the very systems of impunity and dysfunction that block meaningful progress, he states in the Al Jazeera analysis. Yes, Gates’s decision to donate most of his fortune to Africa is, of course, admirable. But as an outsider immersed in the logic of “white saviourism” and “philanthrocapitalism”, he cannot fix a continent’s self-inflicted wounds. No foreign billionaire can. Only Africans – through transparent, courageous and locally driven leadership – can.’