The branding of malaria

A big opportunity for business-minded philanthropists

THIS Thursday George and Laura Bush are due to host a most unusual product launch. The new brand to be unveiled with much fanfare at a White House summit is malaria―or, more precisely, the eradication of malaria. The brains behind the summit, a group of business leaders and philanthropists operating under the auspices of a non-governmental organization called Malaria No More, are convinced that the time is right to launch what they hope will be the next big thing in the giving business.

Today, they point out, most Americans know little about malaria and care less. Yet eradicating the mosquito-borne disease has all the ingredients of a great charitable brand. There is a clear need, easily illustrated with the usual moving pictures of suffering poor people. There is a clear goal, the complete eradication of a disease that currently kills around 1m people a year. There is a plan in place to achieve that goal. And, lest anyone doubts the chance for success, there is evidence from America itself that the disease can be stamped out. “From a businessman’s perspective, this is the perfect storm of marketing opportunities”, says Malaria No More’s Scott Case, a former top executive at an internet firm, Priceline.com.

The best charity brands nowadays offer a simple product for their customers, sorry, donors, to “buy”. Oxfam’s Christmas catalog, Oxfam Unwrapped, is perhaps the best example of this, with its heartwarming selection of stocking fillers including school dinners for 100 poor kids at £6 ($12), a goat for a poor farmer at £24, or kitting out the economy of an entire village for £1300. Malaria No More is planning to compete for the pre-Christmas surge in charity with its own blockbuster gift: malaria-beating insecticide-laced bed nets at $10 each. But its bed-net campaign is not just for Christmas. A host of high-profile multi-media fundraising activities are planned for next year to market bed-net charity to the great American public. “If Starbucks can figure out how to sell $7.5 billion of coffee each year, we, all the citizens of the world working together, should be able to figure out how to raise $5 billion every three years to buy a bed net”, says Lance Laifer of Hedge Funds vs Malaria, who will be at Thursday’s summit.

Christmas would not be Christmas without Scrooge, and the bed nets campaign has prompted a few cries of “Bah! Humbug!”―none of them entirely groundless, it must be admitted. One billionaire who cares deeply about beating malaria recently told The Economist that, when bed nets are given away, they are less likely to get used properly by their impoverished recipients, who may instead treat them as wall hangings or even “insecticide-laced wedding dresses”. Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund, a much admired non-profit venture fund that invests in entrepreneurial solutions to poverty, and is backed by Google among others, fears that distributing bed nets for free is not a sustainable solution, and that a better approach is to develop private markets for bed nets. Acumen has invested in a firm that sells bed nets for around $3 each, a price within the reach of many, though by no means all, poorer people.

That the free bed nets campaign has the enthusiastic support of Jeffrey Sachs has also set alarm bells ringing among those who think the publicity-loving economist is prone to solutions based on throwing money at problems rather than grappling with the underlying complexities.

Certainly, some of the most popular charity products―sponsoring a child, for example, or, if you are a celebrity, adopting a child―have often been of doubtful impact. Yet there are plenty of reasons to hope that the bed nets campaign will be different, which is why the people behind Malaria No More are so optimistic. Many of them have been involved in broader efforts to fight poverty, such as the “Make Poverty History” and “One” campaigns around the G8 summit in 2005, and in the fight against HIV/Aids, compared to which eradicating malaria is relatively straightforward. Several factors have combined to create Mr Case’s perfect storm, meaning that free bed nets can be the final piece in an integrated solution including better education, prevention and treatment, not merely a high-profile symbolic gesture.

Incentivized in part by George Bush’s $1.2 billion “President’s Malaria Initiative” announced in June 2005, a growing number of African governments have developed plans of their own to tackle malaria. (Happily, there is no malarial equivalent of South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, denying that the disease is spread by mosquitoes.) The drugs industry has been similarly encouraged by Gordon Brown's push for a global fund to buy a malaria vaccine if one is developed. Companies in malaria-hit areas are waking up to the self-interest case for participating in the fight against malaria. For instance, BHP Billiton, a mining and commodities company, says it has helped raise productivity by supporting anti-malaria initiatives in Africa, not least thanks to reduced absenteeism. There have also been big steps forward in techniques for fighting malaria―how best to spray mosquito-infested areas, for example; and in technology, allowing the creation of bed nets that remain effective for up to five years.

Malaria No More is an example of a new business-inspired breed of philanthropy that has flourished in recent years under the leadership of a new generation of wealthy entrepreneurial givers, of whom Bill Gates is the most prominent. These new philanthropists aim to use money and skills built up in the private sector to make an impact on the biggest problems facing the world. At the heart of this approach is the “leveraging” of private money through partnerships with governments, companies and non-governmental organizations. The new campaign against malaria may provide the best test yet of whether the hype about this new philanthropy is justified. Wish it well.

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