Additionally, last year's Goalkeepers report held up promising innovations being developed in Côte d'Ivoire, India, and Zambia to improve basic skills at a massive scale. 

Gates said it is good news that the transfer of best practices, both within and between countries, is possible. He hailed China's efforts along these lines to reduce domestic inequality and to help other countries by sharing its experience. 

"China is in many ways the best example in the world, both of raising the absolute level of health and education, and also being very serious about looking at the inequities," Gates said. 

The report also highlighted China's success in effectively scaling up maternal health. It said that 30 years ago, women in rural China were more than twice as likely as women in urban areas to die in childbirth. Now, that gap has been almost completely closed. Meanwhile, the national mortality rate is less than 20 per 1000,000 live births, well below the SDG target of 70. 

Li Yinuo, China director of the Gates Foundation, said , "China achieved this equitable progress by investing in maternal and child health as part of the primary care system, improving the insurance system so that more people are covered for more services, and launching a maternal and child health campaign targeted specifically at poor families in central and western areas."

Emerging technologies: Promising tools for equality 

When asked about the role new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) can play in addressing inequality, Gates told China.org.cn that AI can be applied to nearly anything, and that it is great that AI is becoming more affordable so that it will benefit more than just the wealthier countries. 

Gates specified that AI is effective in medical diagnostics and that the foundation is looking at the technology for detecting cervical cancer with an image using specialized software. 

AI can also be used for disease modeling and to increase understanding of the spread of disease, human behavior and the immune system, Gates added. 

"In the polio eradication campaign, we use a lot of AI to decide where is the virus and where we need do a better job of getting the vaccine out to children," Gates said, adding, "We're able to input satellite photos into the system to see where people have not been vaccinated and compare that with our on-the-ground plans where the teams actually went to give out the vaccine."

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