Bill-Gates-speech at Goalkeepers-event-2018

As world leaders gathered for the UN General Assembly in September, Gates foundation hosted the second annual Goalkeepers event in New York City on September 25 and 26, 2018. Speakers from around the world joined us for this two-day event, sharing their stories, ideas, and challenges. Bill Gates gave a talk at the foundation’s annual Sustainable Development Goal-keepers event, where he told the story of progress so far, the challenges that remain, and how we can solve them.

Original video URLs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efnHiz0USQE [Bill Gates YouTube channel]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swCxEmsXPs0 [Gates Foundation YT channel]

Video Transcribed into text by Uniscribe:
https://www.uniscribe.co

START OF TRANSCRIPTION
(Mr. Bill Gates is only speaker)

00:05

Imagine what it's like to live in extreme poverty. You have to think about the basics like your next meal all the time. An extremely poor family mostly has access only to the food that they grow themselves. If you have a bad harvest, one of your animals gets sick, you're going to have a period where you're not getting enough food.

00:25

Daughters in these families have to gather water and wood, they have to cook dinners on an open fire with lots of smoke, and then they have to clean everything up. If they get a chance to do schoolwork at all, it's going to be very late at night. They need a lamp, if they have it, to be able to do that work. So the upshot is, if you're extremely poor, your time and energy really goes to mere survival. Is poverty inevitable? The answer is no.

00:52

We asked 2,000 people on what they thought was going on with poverty. We told them the 1990 number and asked them to guess where it had gone. And their guess was that it had fallen from that 36% down to 22%.

01:08

In fact, the real line is far, far better. It drops all the way down to 9%. That means since 1990, 1.2 billion people have overcome extreme poverty. As the economist Max Roser has said, the newspapers could have run a headline, "Number of people in poverty fell by 137,000 since yesterday, every single day for 25 years and been right." Real news.

01:39

According to the World Bank, this extreme poverty definition we use is a cutoff of about $1.90 per day or less. Getting out of extreme poverty is not the end goal. We want people lifted up way beyond extreme poverty. But it's really the start that gets things going, that gets countries on the way to self-sufficiency and moving towards middle income. So this is not just about the individuals, it's also about the countries themselves.

02:05

A single dot is representing a million people. Right now you're seeing the number of dots that represent the number of people who overcame poverty since 1990. It's really great to see how we've made that incredible reduction because it hints, okay, what remains, what do we have to do in the future? The progress came really in two great ways.

02:29

The first wave was China. In 1990, 66% of people in China were extremely poor. So you can see all the dots there each representing, again, a million people. But over just a short period of 15 years, their extreme poverty declined by over 500 million. The improvement in people's lives there is one of the most astonishing examples of progress in world history. The second wave came in India.

02:58

Progress there started later, and it's been more gradual, but it's also an impressive trend.

03:04

India went from 400 million people in extreme poverty in 2005 to just under 100 million today. And over the next several decades, that number is going to drop quite a bit. So the question we face here is can we create a third great wave of poverty reduction in the rest of the world that will bring extreme poverty near to eradication?

03:29

It's not going to be easy. We can go back to our dots, again looking at each one representing a million people, but now we're going to look at the people who remain in extreme poverty.

03:40

So starting back in 1990, we're going to take all those dots and do a pie chart that gives us a sense of what it looked like by region back in 1990. So you can see sub-Saharan Africa, the blue part there, represented a relatively small slice of extreme poverty in 1990.

04:01

But because this has fallen so quickly in East and South Asia, so we're dropping the total number of people a lot.

04:10

But also, as we drop those numbers, you can see that that Sub-Saharan slice, the blue slice, is getting to be a very substantial part of this pie. In fact, if we project this out to 2050, it's rather stunning. It's a trend that I sort of was aware of, but even I was surprised when we ran these numbers that it shows that almost 90% of the people remaining in extreme poverty will be in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2050.

04:40

If we zoom in even more and take it at the country level, we can see that there's quite variability in the progress here. We see that a few countries represent a lot of what remains, about a dozen here. In fact, if you just take the two countries with the most people, which would be the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, that alone will be 40% of the entire world's population in extreme poverty.

05:09

And if we zoom even further in and look at a map of Nigeria and say, okay, where inside Nigeria we have this, based on 2013 data, we can see that it's not spread evenly. As you move towards the north, there's far more poverty than in the south. And so this gap that you're seeing there

05:29

grows quite a bit over time. What this means is that this poverty is going to be a feature of life in a few places and these are places where there are the fewest opportunities. Often some of these places there's violence, a lack of stability. These are places where climate change will make these subsistence farmers lives more difficult

05:52

Also, these are often places where the governance is not providing the primary health care or education even at a basic level. And every one of these places are exactly where we're experiencing rapid population growth.

06:09

The geography of births in the world is changing, and this is something that's really fascinating. Over the rest of the century, the number of babies born stays about the same. We've really reached peak baby. But if we look at this chart, we can see that the places that they're born are changing. We've split it into a blue line, which is babies born in Sub-Saharan Africa every year, and the white line, which is the entire rest of the world.

06:36

And you can see you go from today, where by the end of the century, it's almost getting up to the point where half of the babies on the planet are born, not just in sub-Saharan Africa, but overwhelmingly in the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa. So the 10 countries projected to be the poorest in the world in 2050 currently are only 10% of the world's births.

07:00

By 2050, they're 20 percent, and by 2100, using these UNFPA numbers, it could get up to 40 percent. So in short, babies are going to be born in what are currently the toughest circumstances in the most challenging places in the world.

07:18

They'll be born in situations where they'll at least start out spending all their time as a family, as an individual, just seeking out the food that they need and not have as much time to invest, invest in their education, invest in building assets. So we really need to address this. We need to double down on key investments in these very tough places. The first two waves are also instructive in terms of what these investments should look like.

07:47

Let's start with the investments in the people, primarily in their health and education. China set a great example here. In 1990, one in three Chinese children were chronically malnourished, which means that not only physically but also mentally, they never fully developed. They did not achieve their potential. And the typical Chinese youth never got into high school. Well,

08:14

Since then, China has solved that malnutrition problem. And in education now, almost all students not only graduate from high school, a very high percentage, almost half, attend college. You just look at those cities in China and you see, wow, something miraculous came out of those human capital investments. And so to create this third wave of poverty reduction, sub-Saharan Africa's young need the same level of investment in their human capital.

08:44

Of course, the size of that investment is going to be very large because of this population growth, the doubling in their youth population by 2050. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for these youthful generation, we need to get a lot of resources there and help those countries build these systems.

09:03

Our partner, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, did these poverty projections on the continent considering a couple of scenarios where the key thing we varied was the investment level in human capital. And so the status quo shows that the absolute number of people in extreme poverty will go up by about 50 million by 2050. That's disappointing.

09:29

Even more sobering, though, is if we look at what some donors have talked about doing in terms of disengaging. We look at governments not continuing to improve. There you get a very dire situation where the number almost doubles. It gets up to 672 million. But we also took a scenario, the one we believe in, the one we all want to rally around, where we increase...

09:53

that human capital investment, where we improve those health systems and those primary and secondary schools. And there, we're able to drive that extreme poverty down by over 90 million from where we stand today. So the gap between the bad scenario and the good scenario is over a factor of two, almost 400 million people. So that's really what's at stake. But the right innovation

10:18

which is the most powerful force in the world. I really believe it's possible we might be able to do even better than that. You know, a great example of this was what a discussion like this would have been about India back in the 1960s.

10:32

The yield per wheat, which was very, very meager, was changed by modern technologies and techniques. And now we're at almost four times the productivity. That's another innovation we need to bring to Africa. But innovation can appear in many, many different sectors.

10:51

And so we need some great innovations. Soil maps, how we can pick the right fertilizer, digital technology to help us understand what's going on with malnutrition and help solve that, education and how by getting reading resources out there to kids, their natural curiosity will let them help develop the key skills. And so it's by investing in this innovation

11:13

and backing young innovators across Sub-Saharan Africa, we can get a very positive scenario. I do remember what it was like to be rebellious and have new ideas. I waited until my parents were asleep and I snuck out of the house in the middle of the night to go up and use a computer in the University of Washington's physics department.

11:35

There were a few hours in the middle of the night when the graduate students weren't there and I could have a few hours on this big, amazing machine. I would do anything to get my hands on it and try out to see what the magic of software could do. And that's the kind of rebelliousness or new thinking that I'm hoping we can tap into today. The natural desire of youth to change things and make the world better.

12:00

The world we want, a world in which every person can dream of a better future and make it come true, is a world without extreme poverty. Thank you.