Melinda French Gates is a computer scientist and the co-chair of the world's wealthiest philanthropy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

She's also the founder of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company propelling social progress for women and families in the US.

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World is an effortless, cosy, consequential and imperative read. It's frolic, concise, and can be completed in one sitting.

It's guaranteed to change everyone's perception on the primal significance of inspiring and motivating women. It also ennobles how female empowerment levitates the society.

Melinda endows evidence that women’s rights and communal health and wealth, ascend simultaneously. She elaborates that the inclusion and elevation of women, correlate with the resolutions of a healthy community.

“The primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do and think they can do, for themselves and their children," she writes.

Computer science

Melinda grew up in Dallas, Texas and attended Ursuline Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school. She later joined Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina for a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s in business administration, graduating with first class honours.

She got an employment opportunity IBM, but snubbed it, preferably gleaning a job at Microsoft in 1987.

 She was the only woman in the first class of MBA graduates. “When I went to Microsoft for my hiring interviews,” she writes, "all, but one of the managers were men. That didn’t feel right to me."

Melinda spent nine years at Microsoft, eventually becoming a general manager. Her ex-husband Bill Gates, co-founded Microsoft in 1975. They met shortly after Melinda's appointment and married on New Year’s Day in 1994.

Melinda developed multimedia products at Microsoft, before leaving the company in 1995.

She focused on nurturing her children, Jenn, Rory, and Phoebe. She also shifted her attention to philanthropy and expended her time prefatorily, exploring ways to hearten people’s lives.

“It’s no accident that Rory was born three years after Jenn,” she writes, "and our daughter Phoebe was born three years after Rory.” 

She says she was fortunate to conceive when she aspired. To deter pregnancy when she wasn't predisposed, propelling her and Bill to command the life and family they coveted.

She recalls her visit to rural Malawi and studied a mother, who was carrying a baby in her womb, another on her back, and a pile of sticks on her head. She had clearly trekked a long distance, with no shoes.

While in Blantyre Malawi, women inquired about Depo-Provera, a family planning contraception, when they took their children for vaccination.

Another child

In Niamey Niger, a woman with six children enlightened Melinda that it would be detrimental for her to conceive another child.

In Nairobi’s Korogocho slums, she met Mary, a young mother who sold backpacks, made from scraps of jean fabrics and had no access to family planning contraception.

Increasingly in her trips, Melinda corroborated the evidence of despondence for contraceptives. She visited communities where every mother had lost a child and everyone knew a mother who had died at childbirth.

She also met mothers who were forlorn to evade pregnancy, because they couldn’t sustain the children they already had. She then understood why women persistently mentioned contraceptives.

Melinda says that when women were able to time their pregnancies, they were sure of advancing their education, earn an income, foster healthy children, and have time and resources to feed and educate their children.

"It took us years to learn that contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created,” Melinda writes.

She believes every woman should deploy her voice and foment her potential, stating that ladies and men should collaborate to end the biases that subjugate women.

Her passionate purpose was to summon a moment of lift for women. She affirms that when you elate women, you enliven humanity.

She ponders on how to enthuse human hearts so that everyone can instigate the uplifting of women. This resulted to the revitalisation of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to focus on contraceptives.

“This is how families and countries get out of poverty. In fact, no country in the last 50 years has emerged from poverty, without expanding access to contraceptives,” she writes.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, a Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre @jeffbigbrother