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Perry’s hero is a man from New Jersey called Ray Chambers. Never heard of him? Me neither, but that’s the way Chambers likes it. He is a very rich man and made his millions by what would become known as leveraged buy-outs. In a time of discredited risk-taking financiers, this makes him more villain than hero. But Chambers had his road-to-Damascus moment when he found that making money was not making him happy; it was what you did with it that counted. He became a philanthropist, but one with a difference. He wasn’t interested in salving his conscience by giving his money away. His originality was in combining self-interest with philanthropy, carrying over business methods into good works.
The Malaria No More campaign he co-founded piqued Perry’s interest. Here, it seemed, was a novel approach to aid that just might work. Perry sought and got Chambers’s cooperation in following the course of the campaign. At one end of the scale he attended high-powered meetings involving the likes of Bush and Blair; at the other, he visited one of the worst places in the world for malaria, the swamp land at the western edge of Lake Kwania in Uganda, where the only people he passed as he drove into the town of Apac were three wild-looking naked men. When he asked the district health officer for an explanation, the doctor told him: ‘Brain damage. Severe malaria can do that to a baby. You never recover.’
Everyone knows what to do about malaria. Spraying (not indiscriminately with DDT, which gave rise to the Silent Spring environmental revolution) and distributing mosquito nets impregnated with insecticide will go a long way towards preventing the disease if done on a large enough scale. The problem is a logistical one: how to achieve the blanket coverage needed to eradicate the disease. In 1969, in the wake of the DDT scandal, the WHO dropped its global malaria eradication campaign (which, amazingly, had somehow bypassed Africa) and concentrated on more achievable targets. But following the establishment of Malaria No More, the UN made Chambers its Special Envoy for Malaria and he and his co-workers took on the task of getting rid of malaria globally but most immediately in Africa, where the disease took its largest toll. And as if that weren’t a big enough task, they set 31 December 2010 as the deadline for achieving anti-malarial bed-net coverage throughout Africa.
That they came anywhere near realising this target demonstrates the effectiveness of the business model. They did it by involving African governments, no matter how uncooperative or corrupt some of these were, and by working with both Muslim and Christian religious leaders, even where they were bitterly opposed to one another, as in Nigeria. It would have been impossible to do without the active involvement of Africans, who had to see that fixing malaria was in their own economic interest.
The sustainability of the fight against malaria has yet to be proved; in time bed nets will need replacing and some countries have a better record than others in providing and distributing them. But it is evident to Perry that an extraordinary transformation has already taken place. When he returned to Apac 16 months after his first visit, people were no longer afraid to come out at night and there was hardly a mosquito to be seen. Apathy had been replaced by energy and the number of deaths from malaria, particularly child deaths, had plummeted.
Global oil companies have also gone into the aid business, subscribing to the idea of ‘doing well by doing good’. Yet in late 2010 the fact that celebrities like Cheryl Cole and Didier Drogba had suffered attacks of malaria was considered more news-worthy than this far bigger story. Alex Perry’s achievement is to correct this media bias and do it in a thoroughly readable way.
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