Here Is Bill Gate's Speech At The 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture

At this year's Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture held in Pretoria, South Africa Yesterday 17th July 2016, the Microsoft boss highlighted needs to support African youths as a way to build the continent.

According to the billionaire, "the world must work together to ensure Africa’s young people can seize their potential and thrive.

Bill Gates said he will meet with some African young innovators in the coming days - one of them is the 21-year-old who founded Kenya’s first software coding school to provide other young people with computer programming skills, and the other is the 23-year-old social entrepreneur in South Africa who manufactures schoolbags from recycled plastic shopping bags.

Delivering the 2016 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus, Gates said he was optimistic about the future of the continent because of its young people. Pointing out that "Africa was demographically the world’s youngest continent – in the next 35 years, it is estimated that 2-billion babies will be born in Africa and by 2050, 40% of the world’s children will live in Africa. Gates said he believed Africa’s youth “can be the source of a special dynamism”.

“Economists talk about the 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 work force.”

“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 are not locked in by the limits of the past. The real returns will come if we can multiply this talent for innovation by the whole of Africa’s growing youth population,” Gates said.

The theme of his speech which was “Living Together”.
Gates said he had admired Mandela, whom he had met on many occasions. He said that “one topic that Nelson Mandela came back to over and over again was the power of youth”.

“There is a universal appeal to the conviction that youth deserve a chance. I agree with Mandela about young people, and that is one reason I am optimistic about the future of this continent,” said Gates.
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