The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to introduce a new 8-year contraceptive in Africa, starting with Kenya and Nigeria. Designed to be affordable for women in low-income households, the new hormonal intrauterine device (IUD) is inserted into the uterus, where it releases progestin, a synthetic hormone that thickens cervical mucus to prevent sperm from reaching and fertilising an egg. The Foundation is promoting the initiative as a way to empower women and girls in low and middle-income countries with the contraceptives needed to plan their families and futures (Business Insider Africa).
Having summarized technicalities, I will share some reflections:
1) The best way to help African women is by first listening to African women, not imposing what you think is best for them.
2) African women and girls must never be treated as experimental subjects for global health research and innovations.
3) Has every new medical treatment or device being offered to African women and girls first been tested on Western women and girls in the most advanced countries?
Many African leaders, in their usual myopia, docility, and wretchedness stand aside with arms akimbo, while the people whose welfare they are entrusted to faithfully advocate and protect are made the hapless subjects of global health experiments.
Any respectable African leader would swiftly reject and ban such experimental medicines targeting African women and girls. Then, as a teaching point, they should firmly condition any potential future use in Africa on the drug’s prior approval, widespread use, and documented long-term effects among women in Western countries with the strictest medical standards.
But what of the reproductive health gaps these foreign foundations claim to address? Should limited options not justify accepting such experiments? Any African leader who thinks this way should resign from office and vanish into the wilderness. It is the sacred duty of African leadership to create, fund, staff, and grow original African medical and research institutions capable of producing homegrown innovations to solve indigenous needs. Once these institutions are established and thriving, they may partner with foreign foundations—but on African terms—directing them on how best to support those needs. Foreign foundations should supplement local capacity, never supply it.
In relation to this topic, I encourage you to watch the brief documentary “Medical Colonisation – The Dreadful Role Africa Plays in Medical Research” by Simon Whistler. It exposes the dark history and ongoing exploitation of Africa as a testing ground for Western medical advances.
YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmvZ3PMflO0&list=PL9aSrHMHYHciyNcaAfNM-MRgGWsYbEFWR
African leaders, either rise to the high standard of visionary leadership and be effective guardians of your people’s welfare, or be replaced in the wind of change to blow across Africa.
~Dr. Ikenna A. Ezealah, Ph.D., MBA
Builder of the African Future
Nation Upbuilding 