Branson, on building an airline in Nigeria.

Richard Branson: The president of Nigeria contacted me and said, "We’ve got planes that crash in West Africa and we don’t have any safe airlines. Could you please come and set up a safe airline for us?"

Now we never expected to make a lot of money from that, but it’s the right thing to do. So we’ve set up Virgin Nigeria. And now people can fly on a safe airline and know that they can get from A to B safely. And it also will help the economy dramatically.

And then there’s just putting our social skills to the enormous problems of Africa, and generally trying to see whether we can make a real difference there.

And that’s something which we’re spending a lot of time and energy on looking at.

Looking at HIV and trying to see whether there’s a different way of saving the millions of lives that have been lost over time. Looking at malaria, trying to see if there’s different ways of tackling those problems and so on.

Recorded on: July 5, 2007