I can defeat Malaria.

Today, I’m going to propose how to accomplish one of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

United Nations Millennium Development Goal #6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases Target #3: Have Halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

So today I was looking through the UN’s Millennium Development Goal updates and I found this report. In a nut shell it claims that although the use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets (although there has been a big increase) currently fails to meet target numbers expected to fulfill the Millennium Development Goal.

Now, I might have an explanation why the use of mosquito nets, which are instrumental in preventing babies and infants from contracting malaria (one of the biggest killers of babies and infants in developing countries), isn’t at the level that the UN wants. My explanation is related to something I realized in Tanzania. For you to understand how I cam upon this realization, I will tell you the some background info.

The village I was living in was called Mateves. On the outskirts of Mateves there was a giant factory called A-Z Textile Mills Factory. Guess what they made? Mosquito Nets. Now, this factory is actually so important that George W. Bush Jr. visited the same factory in 2008 when he was in Africa to commend the factory for its efforts in the fight against malaria. Link to newspaper story talking about it.

Allright, now that the background has been established, I will explain to you my realization. One morning while I was in Mateves, I decided to discover more of Mateves so I started walking around the village. Adults stared at me (it’s not often a mchina walks around your neighborhood) and kids chased after me to hold my hand. I met many villagers and many people invited me into their homes. There was something very peculiar about all the houses I went into though…none of them had mosquito nets!

Story time: It turns out, after Bush’s visit to A-Z, he gave every person in Mateves, the very same village I was living in, a mosquito net as a gesture of good will. Not more than a year later, however, there is not a single mosquito net in Mateves. It actually was quite an ironic situation, the very huts and shacks outside of A-Z, one of the biggest mosquito net factories in Tanzania, didn’t have any nets for themselves. You probably are wondering: where did the hell did the nets go? Well, it turns out, all of the villagers sold their nets to local markets for some extra money. These families were so poor that they would rather sell the mosquito nets and risk their future children contracting malaria than keep the nets to protect their children.

Honestly, I can understand where the villagers are coming from. Why would you keep a mosquito net if you don’t even have enough money to feed the family on a consistent basis? This is when I realized how truly complicated developmental problems are in third-world-countries. It isn’t just the fight against malaria, it’s the fight against malaria intertwined with poverty, infrastructure, economics, and a ton of other social/political items. The villagers suffer from malaria not because they aren’t educated about the parasite, it is because they are poor. If you truly want to fight malaria, you have to first fight poverty. This is pretty much impossible right? There’s no way we can eliminate poverty. I mean, no matter what we do, someone, somwhere, is going to be in some kind of poverty. So here comes my magical idea:

So, I was looking at project called One Laptop per Child. The gist of the project is that if you provide every child in a developing country with a XO  (a special solar-powered high-endurance solar-powered labtop), they can access the plethora of information on the web to help advance the education of the world’s poorest children. The key to this program is making sure that every child has one so that no one will sell or trade the computers away and they remain with the child. Essentially, by providing a surplus supply, the demand for them in the market decreases to nothing. Taking the same mentality of artificially increasing the supply so there is no longer a benefit of selling the goods in the market, I propose that the UN invest money in simply buying a large quantity of mosquito nets for every individual in a country afflicted with malaria.  Then, it should organize a taskforce (with the key aid of community-based organizations) whose main responsibility is the distribution of mosquito nets to every household in a country. It is key that every single person either be given a net or at least has simple access to a location where a free one can be acquired. The trick behind it is timing. If you can spread these nets fast enough, the net price of the nets will creep down towards nothing. The longer the wait, the chances of a person selling the net for money increases while the net still has some market value.

Financially speaking: a mosquito net is roughly 5 dollars. Tanzania (one of the top 5 countries suffering from malaria) has an estimated 29 million people.  5 x 29 million is 145 million dollars. The UN’s budget is a bit more than 2 billion dollars a year. This is roughly a mere 7% of the UN’s annual budget. Not only that, once the project has been completed, there is no need to continue spending money on mosquito net programs and that money can be spent on other resources.

I know this is a very rough outline and I’m sure that there are many flaws, but I feel if the UN stopped trying to be Superman and do everything at once and focused on a single problem at a time, much much more would be accomplished.

Thoughts?

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