Increased Health Funding Will Reduce Poverty Rate In Nigeria —Melinda Gates
The Co-chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mrs. Melinda Gates, in this interview with BUKOLA ADEBAYO says good leadership and increased funding of health sector, especially northern Nigeria, is what the country needs to reduce poverty rates and improve its present health indices. Excerpts… In Nigeria and many other parts of Africa, family planning is seen solely as a woman’s need. As a family planning advocate, how can we change this perception? I think one of the things that I’m seeing in other places in West Africa that are working, for instance in Niger, and which Bill and I highlighted in our report, is cultural change. To get people to use a tool like a new form of birth control, you actually have to get cultural change. And one of the things Niger did was they actually started with a husband school. They taught the husbands first why the women would be healthier, would die less in childbirth, and why their children would be healthier if they allowed their wiv...