by SONIA SHAH
Anopheles mosquito: Her abdomen full of blood that will nourish her eggs, a female Anopheles mosquito takes to the air. Her next landing may be a dangerous one—for the human who receives her bite. The female Anopheles mosquito is the only insect capable of carrying the human malaria parasite. PHOTO/Hugh Sturrock/National Geographic
There was a time when it was de rigueur for those concerned with the well-being of the global poor to rail against big business. Not anymore. In recent years, the private sector has become the most sought-after source for global aid groups in search of leadership and financing. In 2008, Raymond Chambers, a phenomenally successful financier and major philanthropist, was appointed the first-ever United Nation special envoy for, of all things, the mosquito-borne disease malaria, which kills nearly one million people every year.
Journalist Alex Perry started shadowing Mr. Chambers as he set about cajoling health ministers, religious leaders, business leaders and the directors of international agencies to help him meet the goal set by the U.N. secretary-general: to provide an insecticide-treated bednet to everyone in the world who needed one, some 3.3 billion people, by the end of 2010. As documented in “Lifeblood,” Mr. Chambers didn’t meet that goal, exactly. Still, by December 2010, with countdown clocks ticking on their desks, Mr. Chambers’s team had overseen the financing and distribution of a staggering 289 million bednets, an achievement that Mr. Perry calls “one of the most successful aid campaigns of all time.”
But Mr. Perry goes further, crediting Mr. Chambers’s achievements primarily to protocols drawn from the private sector. Figuring that Africa suffers the brunt of the malaria burden, he explains, Mr. Chambers applied the “old 80/20 rule of business” and focused on the seven countries that account for two-thirds of Africa’s malaria cases: Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Chambers proved himself a formidable fund-raiser by emphasizing the ambition of the effort rather than the severity of the suffering. Mr. Perry holds the effort up as a model of a new kind of business-driven aid that offers something “extraordinary” to the aid world: “reinvention, even salvation.”
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