Rich countries should be more generous with their aid budgets so that we can have more resources for healthcare, said Bill Gates, Co-Chair and Board Member, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The visionary entrepreneur and philanthropist was all praise for India, saying the country is making progress on innovation and that the Foundation is piloting new scalable ideas.
"India is making progress; we pilot a lot of these new ideas there and then scale them up to the entire world," Gates told CNBC-TV18 Managing Editor Shereen Bhan in an exclusive interaction at Davos.
The Swiss resort town is hosting the world's top business and political leaders at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meet.
On India's rise as a global vaccine supplier, Gates highlighted how the Foundation has partnered with firms in India to develop breakthrough products. But Gates also pointed out that the pandemic highlighted that we have been underinvested in those innovations.
"India is the volume leader by far with vaccines, starting with the Serum Institute, but also Bharat Biotech and it is fantastic how they responded during the pandemic and worked with the government to make a lot of vaccines."
Gates cautioned that instability in US-China ties can slow down progress, but India can play a role here. Another area of concern, as per Gates, is that rich countries need to enhance their aid budgets.
Speaking about the role artificial intelligence (AI) can play in making the healthcare system more effective, Gates said a new AI product for pregnant women can reduce maternal deaths by 50%. The AI product is being run in India under a pilot program.
"This is pretty incredible because it brings together AI with health. This is the scanner that you can use, so when a woman's pregnant, you scan them, and you can tell if the delivery is going to be difficult or not. Based on that, the woman needs to go where she can get a C-section, or she can have the confidence to stay and just have the local healthcare workers or midwives. And so with this diagnosis, which is very, very cheap, you can reduce maternal deaths by about 50%. It's a new thing. It's under the pilots or underway in India right now."
Gates said he's most excited about the impact of AI on education and healthcare. He also added that ChatGPT will aid in immense productivity gains in the next five years.
(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)
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