36 WorldView Fall 2012 National Peace Corps Association

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n the village of Dindefelo, in
remote southeastern Senegal,
malaria has long been the biggest
killer of children. One of my most
vivid images from my service there as
a Peace Corps Volunteer was of a little
girl, Mariama, brought into the health
clinic burning with fever. She was too
far-gone to be saved. Soon, her tiny
body shuddered and grew limp. She
was carefully wrapped in a small white
sheet before being laid to rest in the
community graveyard.
When I arrived back in Senegal
as Peace Corps country director in
2007, two decades after serving as a
Volunteer, I made an assessment of the
development challenges facing the West
African nation. I wanted to understand
how those issues matched up against
the ways that Peace Corps Volunteers
could meaningfully contribute their
skills and energies.
I found that the largest cause of
child mortality had not changed since
I had worked in Senegal in the late
1980s: malaria was still the biggest
killer of kids in Senegal and the rest
of sub-Saharan Africa. What had
changed, though, was the enhanced
opportunity for Peace Corps Volunteers
to contribute to combating the disease.
In recent years, several new
technologies for malaria prevention,
testing and treatment made it more
possible than ever to prevent sickness
and deaths. And the success of all of
these approaches depends heavily upon
the sort of capacity development and
behavior change and communication
work that Peace Corps Volunteers, as
trusted partners in their communities,
can do so well.
Long-lasting insecticide treated bed
nets can prevent mosquitoes from
biting sleeping children, but only if
they are distributed to every family and
consistently used and repaired. New
and inexpensive rapid diagnostic tests
can cheaply tell if a fever is malaria or
not. But thats only useful information
if you get tested soon after falling ill.
Medicine to treat malaria is highly
eective, curing almost all malaria
cases, but only if the treatment is given
in time. In promoting access to and
eective use of each of these improved
technologies, Peace Corps Volunteers
can, and increasingly are, playing a key
role in saving the lives of Africans across
the continent.
Volunteers have been helping to
combat malaria since the early days of
Peace Corps. In fact, Sargent Shriver
identied malaria prevention as one of
the concrete areas for Volunteer work
in those early days of planning what
Americans would actually do once they
arrived overseas.
In recent years, more and more
Volunteers have become focused on
malaria and other public health issues.
Now, with the launch of the Peace
Corps Stomping Out Malaria in Africa
project, malaria prevention has become
the rst major programmatic initiative
of the agencys second half-century.
In 2007, I found a few Volunteers,
working with the help of an NGO
founded by a Senegal RPCV, trying
to distribute bed nets to every family
in a few villages in the southeastern
region of Kedougouan approach
called universal coverage in which
every sleeping space (and some sleeping
spaces are simply straw mats on the
oor) is covered by a sturdy, insecticide-
treated bed net.
e approach of universal coverage
has been shown to be highly eective in
preventing malaria sickness and death.
By covering everyone at night, when
the mosquitoes that cause malaria come
out, a community can achieve a herd
eect, much like that of vaccines. If
the large majority of people are covered,
then the malaria carrying mosquitoes
stoMpiNG out Malaria iN aFrica
A new Peace Corps initiative is rewriting how Peace Corps Volunteers collaborate
by Christopher Hedrick
Buzz from the Field
Senegal Peace Corps Volunteer Ben Gascoigne shows community member
Abrouhim Souri Diallo how to repair holes in his bed net at the Malaria Fair in
Kedougou, Senegal on July 1, 2012.
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www.PeaceCorpsConnect.org WorldView Fall 2012 37 36 WorldView Fall 2012 National Peace Corps Association
have no means of passing along the
disease. Fall far short of universal
coverage, then those who sleep under
nets every night are still protected, but
the community at large is still at risk.
is small pilot project by a few
intrepid Volunteers proved to be very
eective, cutting severe malaria cases
in those villages by more than half
and eliminating deaths in the rst
year. Ending with that small triumph
would have been a typical, traditional
Peace Corps success story. But these
Volunteers and their Senegalese public
health partners werent satised with
a small victory, so they came looking
for support in scaling up their model
of universal bed net coverage coupled
with intensive malaria prevention and
treatment education.
e charities Against Malaria (www.
againstmalaria.org) and Malaria No
More (www.malarianomore.org) soon
supported a distribution of over 20,000
nets covering the remote 50,000-person
health district of Saraya, in the area
of Senegal with the highest levels of
malaria. is distribution, uniting a
team of two dozen Volunteers with
community health workers, brought
nets by pickup and bicycle down laterite
roads and narrow footpaths to every
small and isolated village in the area
the rst time an entire health district had
ever had universal coverage in Senegal.
In 2010, Malaria No More raised
money from a unique fundraising
campaign in which actor Ashton
Kutcher and the news network CNN
competed to be the rst to have one
million Twitter followers, with the
winner promising a donation to ght
malaria. In the end, over $500,000 was
dedicated by Malaria No More and
its supporters to scale up the malaria
prevention program to the district of
Velingara, in south-central Senegal,
with nearly 300,000 residents. Peace
Corps Volunteers, in alliance with the
Senegalese National Malaria Control
Program and with grassroots support
from the charities Tostan and World
Vision, led a campaign to distribute
100,000 nets and provide intense
malaria prevention education in over
600 villages and towns.
After the success of the Senegalese
www.peacecorpsfellows-wiu.org 800.526.9943 Now accepting applications
38 WorldView Fall 2012 National Peace Corps Association
governments distribution to all
children under ve the previous
year, the Saraya and Velingara eorts
brought new energy into countrys
ght against malaria, demonstrating
what was possible and documenting a
successful distribution and education
methodology.
Soon after the Velingara campaign,
the government announced a new
national policy for malaria prevention:
universal coverage across Senegal. e
U.S. government program called the
Presidents Malaria Initiative (PMI), a
joint eort of the CDC and USAID,
put its substantial weight behind the
universal coverage eort. As Malaria
No More put it, investing in the
universal coverage goal in one region
did more than simply cover that area
it catalyzed a series of events, decisions
and actions that inspired Senegal to
adopt an aggressive and ambitious
strategy against the disease.
What had started with the eorts of
a few Peace Corps Volunteers and their
village counterparts, supported by some
generous RPCVs, had become a new
national policy for malaria prevention
with remarkable results. Malaria
deaths are down dramatically: it is
no longer the biggest cause of infant
mortality in Senegal. And, according
to a recent World Bank study, Senegal
has cut child mortality in recent years
more than any other nation in Africa.
With the right support, Peace Corps
Volunteers and their communities can
help accomplish amazing things.
In late 2010, I presented the Senegal
model of malaria prevention to Peace
Corps headquarters senior sta, and
proposed that we support a continent-
wide campaign, engaging all 3,000
Volunteers in Africa to ght malaria.
A bold set of Peace Corps leaders,
open to new ideas, embraced the
vision and supported what has become
the Stomping Out Malaria in Africa
initiative. (See: www.stompoutmalaria.
org) On April of 2011, on World
Malaria Day, Peace Corps Director
Aaron Williams, along with PMI
leader Admiral Tim Zeimer, USAID
Administrator Raj Shah and Roll
Back Malaria director Awa Marie
Coll-Seck, announced the new Peace
Corps malaria prevention eort. Since
then, we have tried to move Stomping
Out Malaria at Shriver speed, with a
sense of urgency matching the scale of
the problem. Two thousand children
every day in Africa still die of malaria.
Peace Corps Volunteers can make an
important dierence, so there isnt a
moment to waste.
Over the past year and a half, we
have created a Malaria Teamsta
and Volunteers from 21 Peace Corps
posts in Africaall of whom have
participated in an intense 10-day
long Malaria Boot Camp at the Peace
Corps training center in ies, Senegal.
e Boot Camp leverages Skype to
bring in the leaders in the global
malaria prevention community from
institutions such as Johns Hopkins
University and the CDC. We combine
this virtual world-class expertise with
practical, hands-on eld experiences
to deliver an exciting, interactive
curriculum in malaria science and
prevention strategies.
Boot Camp graduates then become
part of an extended Peace Corps team,
linked by continuous communication,
support and learning through online
discussion forums and knowledge
sharing through Google documents.
Malaria Team members, many of whom
are 3rd year Volunteers and RPCVs
serving as Peace Corps Response
Volunteers, partner with PMI sta,
national malaria control agencies and
malaria-focused non-prots. ey
then link our partners with the 3,000
Volunteers in the eld who can help
carry out the malaria prevention,
diagnosis and treatment seeking
education campaigns that make the
dierence at the community level.
Stomping Out Malaria in Africa
leverages the best of the classic Peace
Corps experiencedeep integration and
trust at the community leveland takes
advantage of the disruptive technologies,
productive partnerships and team based
approach of the new Peace Corps.
Combining tradition and innovation,
passionate teams of Volunteers across
Africa are tackling one of the biggest
global public health challenges.
e approach is a radical change for
Peace Corps and the goal of ending
malaria is audacious, but the potential
benets for the children of Africa
are tremendous. We wont stop until
malaria no longer kills any more boys
and girls like little Mariama.
Christopher Hedrick (Senegal 88-90)
served as Peace Corps country director in
Senegal from 2007 to 2012. He is now
coordinating Stomping Out Malaria and
working on other initiatives for the Peace
Corps Africa region. You can follow him
on Twitter @hedrickchris.
Angelina Tawiah helps move bed nets back and forth with a big smile during
the Ghana Health Services Roll Out Campaign in central Ghana.
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