Donate $10 to Stop Malaria

Donating $10 to buy a mosquito net to save an African child from malaria has become a hip way to show you care, especially for teenagers. The movement is like a modern version of the March of Dimes, created in 1938 to defeat polio, or like collecting pennies for UNICEF on Halloween.
Unusual allies, such as the Methodist and Lutheran churches, the National Basketball Association and the United Nations Foundation, are stoking the passion for nets that prevent malaria. The annual "American Idol Gives Back" fundraising television special has donated about $6 million a year for two years. The music channel VH1 made a fundraising video featuring a pesky man in a mosquito suit.

Part of what has helped the campaign catch on is its sheer simplicity and affordability — $10 buys one net to save a child. Nothing But Nets, the best-known campaign, has raised $20 million from 70,000 individuals, most of it in donations averaging $60.

That is a small fraction of the overall need, which experts estimate at $2.5 billion. But it gives the effort a populist edge, and participation is psychologically rewarding for anyone whose philanthropic pockets are shallower than those of Bill Gates.

Crucial to the drive against malaria, which kills an estimated 1 million people a year, mostly in Africa, has been the development of an inexpensive, long-lasting insecticidal net. Unlike old nets, which either had no insecticide or had to be dipped twice a year, the new ones keep killing or repelling mosquitoes for three to five years. When more than 60 percent of the inhabitants of a village use them over their beds while they are sleeping, malaria rates usually drop sharply.
Major donors have focused on malaria since the creation in 2001 of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has paid for 106 million nets. President Bush in 2005 started the President's Malaria Initiative, which has bought 6 million so far.

The Gates Foundation has spent almost $1.2 billion on malaria, and although most goes toward research into vaccines and new drugs, part went to match the first $3 million raised by Nothing But Nets.

In recent years a welter of malaria campaigns has sprung up worldwide, but U.S. participation was anemic until two years ago when Rick Reilly, then the back-page columnist for Sports Illustrated, stumbled onto a BBC documentary about malaria in Africa, which said: "Up to 3,000 children die needlessly each day of malaria — and all they need is a net."

Before asking his readers to donate $10 or $20, he searched for an agency to collect the money and buy the nets. He found the U.N. Foundation, started in 1998 by Ted Turner. Already sponsoring a campaign called Malaria No More, it agreed to his request that a new group be started with the name Nothing But Nets. "That's a real title," Reilly said. "It's so simple that even sports fans can get it."