Success

Rotary

The Net Depot
The Port Moresby Rotary Club received a grant from the Australian government for nets after some Rotarians did a very successful project including nets on Karkar Island. The club bought 10,000 nets. They sell the nets at their cost to anyone who wants to buy them and then use the money to buy more nets. A club member donates room for the nets in a warehouse he owns.

Note: This 'Net Depot' - warehouse idea has been floated to many Rotary Clubs but no one else has taken it up. Some clubs now claim they 'can't find any nets to buy', so the time may be coming.

Rotary Club as Malaria Agency
An earlier government of Papua New Guinea had a hard time accounting for some money from nets their agent had sold. Long story short, they asked the Rotary Club to manage the distribution of mosquito nets. At first, the club used the money to buy more nets as fast as possible to replenish the stores. After a couple seasons they figured out how many nets they needed to keep in stock. They took the extra money and put it on interest in government bonds. They use the interest to hire a clerk - part time - at $50 per month to keep track of the nets. The interest more than covers the wages.

All the funds are fully accounted for. They found 'full financial transparency' is easy when you have Rotarians running the show. They take no salary, donate the warehouse and any money laying around earns interest that gets plowed back into nets, above what the clerk earns.

More recently, Ron Seddon helped the government write a grant to the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria for Papua New Guinea. Over the next few years the country of 5.5 million people will be receiving enough mosquito nets to cover everyone at risk from malaria. They may be able to control malaria completely in the entire country. Eradication is a ways off, until they can remove malaria from all of Asia. The island nations of Indonesia and the Philippines may be hard.

The Solomons
In the Solomon Islands malaria has been notoriously nasty and persistent. In the mid-1990's Rotarians from the local clubs and Australia brought in mosquito nets, spraying, diagnostic testing and medicines. They took the rates of malaria down by 80% or more. Death rates from malaria went to zero. They also introduced blood screening for HIV/AIDS and a few other improvements to health care.

Then the government changed and projects couldn't somehow continue. In a few years malaria was back to being the worst in the Pacific, over 300 infected bites per person per year. After much persistence the Rotarians returned, (2002-2003) this time armed with grants from Rotary Foundation, WHO, and the Gates Foundation. They built clinics, put up mosquito netting, sprayed for mosquitoes and taught local health workers how to deal with malaria, among other diseases. Again the rates of malaria plummeted. Intertribal warfare led the Australian Army to make the Solomons a protectorate. Maybe they'll control malaria completely -for a while- before they leave.

Ron Seddon

Thinking Strategically
Ron Seddon is a ruddy faced Rotarian with a ready smile. He's an Australian who lives in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. He leads a company that handles logistics around the notoriously mountainous and difficult terrain of Papua New Guinea. As a side involvement, a hobby, Ron also coordinates the malaria work of his club.

Ron noticed -and was aggravated by having- at least one of his 151 workers out from malaria on any given day. He had the clerk check the books for absenteeism and always, always at least one person was out with malaria. "Let's give these nets a try," he tells anyone who will listen. "This will be an acid test. Everybody here has bloody malaria."

The families in PNG, as he calls it, live in compounds of 2-3 families. Ron bought nets for them all and gave them out. The numbers of days lost from malaria since - none. Actually, early on a couple new employees missed a day or two the first weeks of work - before he issued nets to them. Now they all get nets right off.

"Best investment I ever made!" he exclaims when telling the story. "I haven't lost a single day to malaria since."

Ron and his Rotary Club in Port Moresby, help administer the Papau New Gunea (PNG) national malaria program by coordinating the importation and distribution of nets for the whole country. They donate storage space and safekeeping along with enormous amounts of time and logistic savvy.

They have a map of PNG showing where every bale of ITNs has gone since they began. With the recent award of funds from the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria (Ron helped write the grant application) they'll be able to cover all children and pregnant women with ITNs and have enough medicine to treat everyone. They hope to take the death rates from malaria - and the sickness rates - as close to zero as they can.

Tracking Progress: Ron's Yellow Dots

Ron brought his huge green map of the island to the 2003 Rotary Convention in Brisbane. The map is dotted with yellow pins. "What are those pins?" I asked.

"Each one's a bale of nets. We've kept track of every net that has ever gone through our hands." Most of the towns have at least one pin.

"What happened here?" I asked pointing to an area mostly covered with yellow.

"ExxonMobil gave us a grant for nets. That's where their operations are. Guess how much malaria they have there now?" he asked rhetorically, shaking his head. "Best defense is a good offense. Saved themselves a small boatload of money, that little donation did. Everyplace else on the island has absenteeism like I had. Theirs is zip."

Radio Conversion

The first grant project that my Rotary club did for malaria, 10 years ago now, was covered by another group first. We had $10,000 (US) that could be shifted to something else. The National Malaria Control Board of Malawi (NMCB) said they needed money for radio ads. I hesistated. They explained that they wanted help shifting the public to a new medicine, SP, which had been officially adopted by not accepted or used by the public. The current medicine, Choroquine, was failing. I reasoned that they knew better than I did, so they did the spots on the radio. Before they aired the messages, the NMCB went to every pharmacy in the country telling them to stock the new medicine because the ad campaign was coming. After stuggling to gain popular acceptance for three years, the country converted to SP overnight. I learned an important lesson. It may very well be the best money we have spent on malaria so far, in terms of impact.

-- Drake Zimmerman, Rotarians Against Malaria

 

last updated 25 May 2006