During the Women Deliver 2016 Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark last month, I had the privilege to sit at the same table with Melinda Gates.

I was among six East African journalists who had been invited to a roundtable with Melinda, after which we had the opportunity to take photos with one of the most influential women in the world.

I immediately put one of the photos on my WhatsApp profile but was surprised that none of my WhatsApp friends seemed to take notice (they normally do when I put a new photo on my profile). They did not know Melinda.

When I returned home, I was excited and proud to show the photos to friends and colleagues at the office. Again, only a few could tell who she was. “Who is she?” someone asked, to which I proudly replied, “Melinda Gates,”

‘Oh, you mean the wife of Bill Gates?’

But Melinda is more than the wife of Microsoft founder and billionaire, Bill Gates. She is one of the most influential people in global health and development. Melinda invests her time and money in the two just to make the world a better place for everyone. And she calls that her second career, after computer science.

Melinda, who is a computer scientist is the co-founder and co-chair of the largest private foundation in the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works with partners around the world to help the world’s poorest people lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. It also aims to harness advances in science and technology to save lives in developing countries.

The foundation was one of the first private foundations among many bilateral donors to fund the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, commonly known as the Global Fund.

Through the foundation, Melinda has done a lot to help alleviate poverty, from funding projects to improve maternal, newborn and child health, raising awareness on family planning, HIV/Aids prevention, to empowering girls and women among many others.

Melinda believes in empowering girls and women as a way to make the world a better place.

“Empowered women and girls are the most powerful forces in development. They make life better for everybody,” says Melinda who has been fighting for girls and women to be supported to reach their full potential.

Empowering women and girls was the buzz word at the 2016 Women Deliver conference which brought together more than 5,000 delegates from around the world to discuss ways to make the world a better place for girls and women. The message echoed by everyone at the conference was that when we invest in girls and women, society benefits as a whole.

Big ambitions

“When I was growing up in Texas in the 1970s, I knew I wanted a career in computer science. I didn’t know a lot of women who worked outside the home, and I certainly didn’t know any who had jobs like the one I aspired to.”

But Melinda was lucky since she had supportive parents. She had a mother who encouraged her to be anyone or anything she wanted and a father who insisted that being a girl should never limit her dreams.

“My dad even made a point of introducing me to the great women he knew and worked with. One was a mathematician. And he said his team was always better when she was on it. From an early age, I saw that women’s contributions and ideas are just as important as men’s,” says Melinda.

She says these are the kind of messages that young women need to get. Unfortunately society doesn’t always give them these messages to inspire them. She is grateful to her parents whose support she says set her on the path to a career in computer science. “It also taught me what it means to be a champion for women and girls,” says Melinda.

During the conference, Melinda received the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)’s Champions for Change Award for Leadership, for her commitment to ensuring that every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.

The Award also recognises her leadership in galvanising global momentum toward the empowerment of women and girls.

Receiving the Award, Melinda said; “Our job as advocates is to make sure that we are supporting women and girls around the world in the right ways by ensuring that we have more and better data, we can get smarter about creating agenda, measure the effectiveness of our work and hold ourselves and others accountable for results.”

Melinda says the current data gap is preventing the global society from identifying barriers to women’s empowerment. She says we can’t close the gender gap if we don’t close the data gap first.

The Gates Foundation announced during the conference, a new commitment to spend USD 80million over the next three years to improve data collection so as to get a better picture of how women use their time, whether they are paid for the work they do or not and whether they experience gender violence, among many other issues.

Melinda says if women and girls can space the births of their children, the outcome is far better for them and for their children. She says family planning gives women a chance to lift themselves out of poverty. But when the world started raising awareness on family planning during the 2012 London Summit on Family planning, one of the things that struck her is how little data there was.

She says one of the things that the global family planning community has done… since then “and we have been part of it is to build the data system so that instead of waiting every three to five years to see how we are doing in family planning, we now get all sorts of indicators every six months.”

Things like whether women actually have access to contraceptives, if so what are the supplies like, which ones do they have access to, whether they are coerced into it, if they know their bodies and many more.

This, she says enables them to tell which of the 69 countries that signed up for the family planning agenda, are on track, which levels are working, which ones are not working, where should they ask their partners to invest more money; if it is in francophone West Africa or Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda.

“That sort of data has helped us know where we are… when I look across the women and girls and look at other places where people might want to invest in and ask other partners and governments, we still don’t have good data. It is a lot like family planning was in 2012,” says Melinda.