Bill Gates commends Sri Lankan healthcare system
Posted on April 21st, 2018
Sunil Jayasiri from London Courtesy The Daily Mirror
Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have built very high quality primary healthcare systems, staffed primarily by women healthcare workers, co-founder of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates said.
He expressed these views while speaking at the joint forum of the Commonwealth Head of Government Meeting held in Westminster on Tuesday.
He praised the Singaporean education system as well. Nobody else is better in the world at education than Singapore,” he said.
Mr. Gates said the Commonwealth has to learn from itself in solving its own problems, stating examples of what Nigeria learnt from India in the eradication of polio.
If you want to do something better, find out who is already doing better than anyone else in the world, and adopt what they are doing, to your own challenges. The Commonwealth is ideal for this and you have positive outliers in almost every area of expertise, and you meet regularly to learn from one another.
Polio eradication is a great example of this. For different reasons, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, are three of the places it has been most difficult to wipe out this disease. But India was declared Polio-free in 2014.
The lessons learnt from there have helped Nigeria get to zero cases in 2017. And now Pakistan, which still has few cases, very few, is taking those experiences, particularly at the challenges of dealing with insecurity, and they have their cases down to the lowest areas ever.
So, this success really goes back to the substantial commitments made in part at the Commonwealth meetings. Collectively, Commonwealth nations are experts in far more than just polio eradication,” Mr. Gates said. ()
April 22nd, 2018 at 7:13 am
But he would be appalled to learn the food availability situation and the corruption and exploitation and waste (some deliberately to keep the price high) associated with food industry in SL. The producing farnmers are paid a pittance, all the profit go to the middle persons and traders with the full support of politicians. The customers are also at the receiving end due to high prices. The waste it says is close to 50% which is a tragedy considering more than 25% manlnutrition among kids and child bearing women. Government and mass media make no effort to inform the public of nutritional eating habits that can be done even with a lower income. Just compare the photos of the average people over the decades, you can clearly see epeole have become smaller in physique.