Large Club Initiative to Lead Rotary
into the Malaria Fight
Rotary’s North American Large Clubs have an extraordinary opportunity to partner with one another, with other clubs, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and with Rotarian Malaria Partners (RMP) to lead Rotary into the malaria fight. Projects are being designed that will, with Rotarians involved, drive down malaria incidence dramatically in the Copperbelt Province of Zambia, an area where malaria is found throughout a population of 2.6 million. Building a comprehensive and highly responsive care network of community-based health workers is the intervention that achieves and sustains a stunning reduction. Rotarians educate and mobilize communities to receive into their homes trained health workers they know as neighbors to detect and treat malaria cases on the spot. With visits throughout the project area, prevention is brought to all children under five instead of only those children receiving care at clinics and hospitals.
Eight Rotary clubs in the Copperbelt have combined forces and hired professional staff to anchor successive Global Grant malaria projects. The Phase l Global Grant application has just been submitted. It seeks TRF funding to augment $170,000 in partner commitments to train 300 Community Health Workers (CHWs) in the first two of the Copperbelt’s ten districts. These CHWs will protect 250,000 residents, equipped with medicines, medical supplies, bicycles and cell phone time to report weekly to health authorities on malaria cases and treatment. Ensuing project phases, all aimed at training and equipping CHWs, will follow Phase I. With expected completion in 2021, an additional $2.5 million will be needed to fully prepare CHWs to protect the Copperbelt’s 2.6 million inhabitants.
Successive Global Grant project applications to cover the other 8 Copperbelt districts will be submitted as funding is committed. Phase II will require $250,000 from clubs. Each Large Club that commits $10,000 with a $10,000 DDF match will contribute a total of $50,000. That’s after adding $10,000 from the match for each club’s commitment just announced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the Long Beach Large Club Conference and $20,000 from The Rotary Foundation Global Grant match.
To reach the estimated additional $2.5 million cost of completing the Copperbelt Campaign will require $500,000 in club contributions. Since the BMGF partnership match applies to all commitments up to $500,000 from Rotary clubs to a malaria project Global Grant, other clubs in your district are eligible. We encourage you to tell them about it.
Join RMP’s trip to Zambia in October to see first-hand how you can help. See the brochure describing the combination of project work and fun planned.
The focus on Zambia’s Copperbelt is to demonstrate that, if Rotarians are involved in a province-wide campaign, dramatic reductions in malaria deaths and prevalence can be achieved and sustained. Large Clubs are encouraged to explore adapting the Copperbelt interventions to other malaria endemic areas where they have established strong working relationships with local clubs on other projects. Rotarian Malaria Partners will be pleased to help.
By entering the malaria fight, Large Club Rotarians will be at the forefront of ending a disease that kills a child every two minutes. For more information, contact Steve Crane, RMP’s Senior Consultant -Strategic Engagement, steve.crane@rotarianmalariapartners.org or visit our website at rotarianmalariapartners.org
