The other day we went to see the Global Business Council on HIV and AIDS [in NYC]. One of their members, L’Oréal, actually trained hairdressers all over Africa about HIV and AIDS, about prevention, testing, and condoms… It’s brilliant because most women get their hair done… There was a group in Brazil that we worked with who did Avon calling… they talked to women about the danger signs in pregnancy… a lot of corporations are seriously committed to these types of things… it’s practical things like that, it’s not rocket science…
How did you get involved in women’s issues? What inspired you?
It was one day. We were living in Nairobi. I was teaching at the university and was interested in African wildlife… I went to the office and said I can type, have a car, and I can speak some Swahili. [She’d have to come back the next day.] Then I went to the family planning clinic… and they asked me to come work for them that day… I did everything from sew curtains… I had a deal with the staff. There was a rule that women who came to the clinic had to have their signature of their husband… a woman had been waiting in line for hours and she didn’t have her husband’s signature…she’d had eleven pregnancies and she had six living children and I thought this is not fair and it’s not right… and that very minute my career took a dramatic shift.
I decided that in my life… I wanted to make sure that women everywhere had as much choice as they could because if you can’t plan your fertility, you can’t plan your life! And women are the ultimate multi-taskers, but they need help and we had the kind of technology. I was twenty-seven and had no children. She was twenty-seven and she’d had eleven pregnancies!
Fast-forward to last April when I went to one of our Gates sites at the Homa Bay district [in Kenya, on Lake Victoria]… we had a community meeting of the shareholders and people of the community health center [FCI started]… people were saying what it meant to have the center…
