In the time it takes to read this article — if you read it slowly to the end — five children will have died of malaria.
According to United Against Malaria, a global mobilisation campaign, the disease claims a child every 30 seconds and causes nearly one million deaths every year. Africa is hit hardest , with 91% of all cases worldwide.
South Africa is not classified as a high-risk malaria country but it is leading a ground-breaking initiative to raise money for the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It is the first time in the fund’s eightyear history that Africa has given, rather than received, funds.
The project’s mastermind, Chris Thorpe, who is perhaps better known as Nando’s general manager, says: ‘The World Cup is being marketed as an African event, so it’s appropriate that South Africans are uniting with their African brothers and sisters to save lives.”
Rewind to 2006. Thorpe is on the banks of the Zambezi, handing out free malaria nets with South African celebrity explorer and humanitarian Kingsley Holgate — it is part of Nando’s leadership development programme. It has been a gruelling day. Mothers have walked for kilometres to the drop-off point, hoping to get a net .
Holgate, Thorpe and the team have consulted the local elders, run their customary informational workshop and handed out hundreds of nets. But the nets have run out and some mothers have to turn around and walk home, empty-handed.
‘It’s a very emotional experience having to turn people away. You see the look in their eyes and they’re desperate,” Thorpe says.
That evening, sitting around the camp fire, Thorpe made a handful of bracelets from scraps of malaria net fibre he found in the left-over packaging from the day’s handout.
He didn’t think much of it — the bracelets were for members of the Nando’s team who had helped out that day. But, back in South Africa, the impromptu gifts inspired Thorpe to embark on a new venture: a community-based craft project, producing traditional beaded bracelets, based on the colour of the light blue plastic mosquito net packets.
Women’s self-help groups in the Western Cape would do the beading. Nando’s would provide retail outlets. The proceeds from sales would buy more nets. ‘It’s a beautiful idea,” Holgate says.
‘Beads were once used by slavers to trade in human flesh on this continent. Now they’re being used to save lives.” Thorpe’s idea took off.
United Against Malaria came on board, as did the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Last year 400 women in Gugulethu, Langa and Khayelitsha started to string together a million rainbow-coloured bead bracelets, ‘the colour palette of Africa”, Thorpe says.
The project was launched worldwide last month to coincide with World Malaria Day. The bracelets retail for R25 and the profits are split three ways: to buy more mosquito nets, pay the beaders and contribute towards Africa’s donation to the Global Fund.
By the end of this year Thorpe hopes to have raised enough money to buy 100 000 nets and donate $1-million to the fund. The bracelets have been endorsed by all the African teams participating in the World Cup, the United States and Australia.
‘We’re taking the energy of this historic event [the World Cup], the first time it’s happened in Africa, to unite against malaria,” Holgate says. Bracelets are already on sale locally at Nando’s, MTN, Vidae Caffè outlets and curio shops.
United Against Malaria is negotiating with a major international retail chain to sell them globally. ‘We’ve banked about 100 000 bracelets already,” Thorpe says, ‘and we haven’t properly launched yet.”
Meanwhile, Holgate is leading another expedition. This month he will hand out 10 000 mosquito nets in 12 African countries and will return home just before the World Cup. He is something of an expert when it comes to malaria.
During a lifetime spent exploring Africa, he has contracted the disease 46 times. Since 2004, when he decided to ‘harness the spirit of adventure to give back to the continent”, he and his team have distributed more than a million nets to Africa’s highest-risk malarial areas.
‘We don’t hand out a single net without giving people a physical demonstration,” Holgate says, ‘and when we do give a net, we place it directly into the hands of a mother with children under the age of five.
They’re the most affected by malaria. ‘It’s not about dishing out millions of nets,” he says. ‘It’s about giving them out in responsible ways to make sure they save lives.”