Here are excerpts from BILL GATES lecture at Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at University of Pretoria, South Africa on July 17, 2016. A must read for every aspiring African Youth.

It is important to recall Nelson Mandela’s legacy, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do so.

But Nelson Mandela was concerned about the future. He believed people could make the future better than the past. And so that’s what I want to focus on for the remainder of my talk.

What can South Africa become? What can Africa become? What can the world become? And what must we do to make it that way?

The Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 laid a foundation that enabled the world, including Africa, to achieve extraordinary progress over the last 15 years.

And the Sustainable Development Goals that recently replaced them set even more ambitious targets for creating the better world we all want.

When I talk about progress, I always start with child survival because whether children are living or dying is such a basic indicator of a society’s values.

Since 1990, child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa has been reduced by 54 percent. That means one million fewer children dying each year compared to 25 years ago.

Ten African countries achieved the very ambitious MDG target of reducing child mortality by over two-thirds.

At the same time, the incidence of poverty and malnutrition is down. And though economic growth has slowed in the past few years, it’s been very robust in many African countries for more than a decade.

This is real progress, but the Africa Rising narrative doesn’t tell the whole story about the life on the continent.

First, the progress have been uneven. You know this very well here in South Africa.

In last year’s Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the French economist, Thomas Piketty, pointed out that income inequality in South Africa is, quote, “--higher than pretty much anywhere else in the world.”

In general, African countries tend to have higher rates of inequality than countries on other continents. And despite healthy average GDP growth in the region, many countries have not yet shared in it. Inequalities exist within countries and between countries.

So until progress belongs to all people everywhere, the real promise of living together will remain elusive.

Second, even with the great progress Africa has made, it still lags behind the rest of the world in most indicators. In sub-Saharan Africa, one in 12 children still die before they turn five. Now, that’s a vast improvement compared to 25 years ago, but African children are still 12 times more likely to die than the average child in the world.

And because rates of poverty and malnutrition aren’t shrinking as fast as the population is growing, the number of people who are poor or malnourished has actually gone up since 1990.

Finally, the progress is fragile. The continent’s two largest economies, here in South Africa and in Nigeria, are facing serious economic challenges. And new threats require attention. The Ebola crisis pointed out weaknesses in many national health systems. The effects of climate change are already being felt among farmers in many countries.

In short, to meet the ambitious goals of the Sustainable Development Goals, Africa needs to do more, do it faster, and make sure everybody benefits. It won’t be easy, but I believe it can be done.

One topic that Nelson Mandela came back to over and over again was the power of youth. He knew what he was talking about because he started his career as a member of the African National Congress Youth League when he was still in his 20s.

I agree with Mandela about young people, and that is one reason I am optimistic about the future of this continent. Demographically, Africa is the world’s youngest continent. And its youth can be the source of a special dynamism.

In the next 35 years, two billion babies will be born in Africa. By 2050, 40 percent of the entire world’s children will live on this continent.

Economists talk about a demographic dividend. When you have more people of working age and fewer dependents for them to take care of, you can generate phenomenal economic growth. Rapid economic growth in East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s was partly driven by the large number of young people moving into their workforce.

But, for me, the most important thing about young people is the way their minds work. Young people are better than old people at driving innovation because they’re not locked in by the limits of the past.

When I started Microsoft at the age of 19, computer science was a young field. We didn’t feel beholden to old notions about what computers could or should do. We dreamed about the next big thing and we scoured the world around us for the ideas and tools that would help us create it.

But it wasn’t just Microsoft. Steve Jobs was 21 when he started Apple. Mark Zuckerberg was only 19 when he started Facebook.

The African entrepreneurs driving startup booms in the Silicon Savannahs from Johannesburg and Cape Town to Lagos and Nairobi are just as young in chronological age, but also in their outlook. The thousands of businesses they’re creating are already changing daily life across the continent.

Nelson Mandela said, “Poverty is not natural, it is man made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”

We are the human beings that must take action. And we have to decide now because this unique moment won’t last. We must clear away the obstacles that are standing in young people’s way so that they can seize all of their potential.

If young people are sick and malnourished, their bodies and brains will never fully develop. If they are not educated well, their minds will lie dormant. If they do not have access to economic opportunities, they will not be able to achieve their goals.

But if we invest in the right things, if we make sure the basic needs of Africa’s young people are taken care of, then they will have the physical, cognitive, and emotional resources they need to change the future. Life on this continent will improve faster than it ever has. And the inequities that have kept people apart will be erased by broad-based progress that is the very meaning of the words “living together.”

Recent estimates done in Nigeria and Uganda indicate that every dollar invested to reduce stunting returns $17 in greater earning capacity in the workplace.

When children’s bodies and brains are healthy, the next step is an education that helps them develop the knowledge and skills to become productive contributors to society.

Improving education is hard work. I’ve learned this first hand through our foundation’s efforts to create better learning outcomes for primary, secondary, and university students in the United States.

But this hard work is incredibly important. A good education is the best lever we have for giving every young person a chance to make the most of their lives.

In Africa, as in the United States, we need new thinking and new educational tools to make sure that a high-quality education is available to every child.

At the university level, we need not only to broaden access, we have to also ensure that we have high-quality public universities that will launch the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs, educators, and government leaders.

I recently met with a group of young crop breeders, one from Ethiopia, one from Kenya, one from Nigeria, one from Uganda. I really love talking about the science of plant productivity. And in this case, I was amazed at the expertise all of these scientists brought to their work on cassava, a staple crop that provides more than one-third of the calories in many African diets.

Our foundation is also working with a young computer scientist from Makerere University who designed a mobile phone app that lets farmers upload a picture of their cassava plants to find out whether it’s infected or not.

These are examples of the kind of innovators who can drive an agricultural transformation across the continent if they have the support they need. For many decades, agriculture has suffered from dramatic underinvestment. Many governments didn’t see the link between their farmers and economic growth.

With Africa’s farms as a base, the next step in economic growth is to promote job creation in other sectors. Doing this will require investment in infrastructure including energy.

Seven in 10 Africans lack access to power, which makes it harder to do everything. Harder to get healthcare in a dark clinic. Harder to learn in school when it’s boiling hot. Harder to be productive when you can’t use labor-saving machinery.

Ultimately, a shortage of power, like many African countries -- including South Africa -- have experienced, is also a drag on economic growth.
Businesses will not invest fully in places where they can’t operate efficiently.

A recent report projected that 500 million Africans won’t have electricity even in 2040. We need to change that.

What Africa needs is what the whole world needs: An energy advance that provides cheap, clean energy for everyone.

The International Budget Partnership, an independent monitoring organization, also ranks South Africa highly for its oversight of government spending.

In some countries, individual citizens are leading the way. In Nigeria, 30-year-old Oluseun Onigbinde gave up a career in banking years ago to devote himself full time to pulling back the curtain on the Nigerian federal expenditure.

With savvy use of data and social media, he founded BudgetIT Nigeria, which provides facts and figures the average Nigerian can understand. No doubt, he’s a thorn in the side of some of Nigeria’s elite, but to me he’s an example of what one person can do to make a difference.

For example, recent research in Uganda showed that providing people with digital cash transfers rather than direct food subsidies not only saved the cost of delivery, it also improved nutrition because recipients used the money to purchase a greater diversity of foods and to space out meals as needed.

Countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria are already investing in the building blocks of this new digital financial platform. And I believe they’ll see substantial positive returns.

If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s this: Africa can achieve the future it aspires to.

That future depends on the people of Africa working together across economic and social strata and across national borders to lay a foundation so that Africa’s young people have the opportunities they deserve.

Complete lecture here:

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Nelson-Mandela-Annual-Lecture?WT.mc_id=07_18_2016_09_MandelaLecture_BG-LI_&WT.tsrc=BGLI