Malawi: Fighting back against malaria

Four-year-old Griverson sits outside his grandparents’ mud-brick house, scuffing the dirt with his bare feet. He’s wearing a dirty pair of Stars & Stripes shorts and, like many of his little friends in this isolated village in rural Malawi, his nose is running and smeared across his face.

Griverson has lost both his parents. His mother died when he was just two, and his father disappeared. ‘No one knows where he is, or what happened to him,’ the boy’s grandmother says. Griverson looks down at his feet, tears welling in his eyes.

His grandmother explains that Griverson is often sick, usually with a bad cough and severe stomach pains. He also fights bouts of malaria. When malaria grips, Griverson lies on his bed – a bamboo mat on the dirt floor – covered by a single blanket. His grandmother watches over him anxiously, waiting for the fever to break.

Malaria haunts nearly half of the world’s population, infecting more than 500 million people every year and claiming more than one million lives annually. Children like Griverson in sub-Saharan Africa are especially vulnerable to the mosquito-borne disease.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that in Africa one in every five childhood deaths is caused by malaria. On average, a child in Africa has between 1.6 and 5.4 bouts of malaria fever per year. Every 30 seconds, a child dies from malaria. Malaria is also prevalent in South Asia and Latin America.

A Health Crisis That Demands Our Response

In regions where malaria is one of the leading causes of sickness and death, World Relief works to combat the disease and educate parents and grandparents about malaria prevention.

Mosquito-repelling bed nets are one of the most effective ways to prevent the disease. In areas where bed nets are widely used and children consistently sleep under insecticide-treated netting, the incidence of malaria has been greatly reduced.

World Relief works alongside local churches in several of the world’s malaria hotspots, including Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Cambodia and Haiti. Through a vast network of trained community health volunteers, hundreds of thousands of parents are equipped to better protect their children.

Independent evaluators say World Relief’s Care Group model is one of the most effective ways to combat diseases such as malaria.