Fixing malaria

A book about a campaign to rid the world of malaria may not sound like a riveting read and Lifeblood is an unlikely page-turner. But you are soon caught up in the challenges of the campaign and, along the way, you learn a great deal about the labyrinthine world of aid, Africa, business and politics.

Alex Perry is the Africa Bureau Chief of Time magazine and has ten years’ experience of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  He knows what happens on the ground, how small a fraction of charitable donations ever reaches the people it is intended to help; and he is not a fan of aid agencies, characterised here as ‘Western arrogance in a white SUV’.

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.