by Alex Perry
For the next few months, Chambers busied himself with Malaria No More. “Just meeting with partners and friends and creating the conversation to see what it would take to get more money,” he says. “Just building and building, much like you would do with a business.” He met leaders of a Lutheran denomination in the US that maintained a wide missionary network on the continent and had also decided to raise funds for malaria. He helped bring a roll call of businesses with big Africa operations—Bayer, BHP Billiton, Chevron, De Beers, DHL, GlaxoSmithKline, Heineken, Marathon Oil, the consultants McKinsey, Newmont Mining, Novartis, Pfizer, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Chartered Bank, and Sumitomo—to Knowles’s March 2007 lecture at Brookings.
He also flew back to Africa as part of an effort to visit each of the most malarious countries and “see what their plans were and how they could be helped.” He handed out bed nets in Uganda. He visited “a few clinics where children were dying of malaria.” He found his resolve hardening. “The worst thing is you see their eyes open. All you see is white. And you know they’re not coming back. You see their teenage mother sitting there, and you can see that they do not have any hope. Put that together with the notion of a $10 net, and I don’t know how anyone could resist wanting to solve this problem. Especially someone like me, with the experience in taking on problems and with the resources to do it.” Speed was becoming ever more important to Chambers. “Every minute you delay, you are losing children. Somebody goes on vacation and does not have their phone on? That’s unacceptable. Bureaucratic delays? That’s unacceptable. Any pause is unacceptable.”
In Rwanda, Chambers met President Kagame and visited the museum in Kigali commemorating the 1994 genocide. There, surveying the glass boxes of skulls that make up the remains of some two hundred fifty thousand people, Chambers had another epiphany. “It occurred to me that malaria was a genocide. How was it that we had a disease that killed a million-plus people a year, and we let it happen? This was a genocide of apathy.”
The opposite of apathy was involvement. Chambers set about using Malaria No More to draw in everyone he could. A glance at the organization’s board confirms it is a charity with a difference. The usual suspects are there. Representing aid are senior figures from UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, the Red Cross, Care, and the UN Foundation. Representing science are Richard Feachem and Brian Greenwood, among others. That was where most aid groups would have stopped. But Chambers also reached out to religion, where he found Rick Warren, the leading evangelical pastor in the US. From the sports world, he took the chair of the Special Olympics, Timothy Shriver, and, later, the soccer player David Beckham and the British tennis player Andy Murray. From entertainment, he recruited the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour to become a board member, while Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Bono, and P. Diddy lent support. From Africa, he drew in heads of state from across the continent as informal consultants. And from business, he took in a swath of leaders, including the CEO of LinkedIn, the cofounder of Priceline.com, and an executive vice president of Time Warner. To Chambers and Chernin, the last group—business—was key. “Malaria is not a science problem,” says Chernin. “It’s a logistics problem, a business problem. There’s an opportunity here for business to provide the urgency and focus on results, organization, and logistics, the kind of thing business is good at.”
If Chambers’s approach was unusual, so was his manner, recalls Gabrielle Fitzgerald, senior program director at the Gates Foundation. “It was around September 2006 that this man I had never heard of called Ray Chambers began showing up at all these malaria meetings,” she says. “He had founded this thing called Malaria No More, and he was like a bull in a china shop. He wanted to do something on malaria, but he didn’t know what. And the malaria world is small. To have this guy come in and mix things up, everyone was asking, ‘Who is this guy?’ It was kind of a rough start. Then he got the White House to host the malaria summit, and Malaria No More and Chambers kind of found their sea legs.”14
But Chambers was still doing things his own way. One problem with marketing the malaria cause, he decided, was that it lacked a good slogan. Like many others, Chambers had been impressed by an April 2006 Sports Illustrated column by Rick Reilly in which Reilly, by connecting sports nets with malaria nets, made the case for malaria. “If you have ever gotten a thrill by throwing, kicking, knocking, dunking, slamming, putting up, cutting down or jumping over a net, please go to a special site we’ve set up through the United Nations Foundation.... Sports is nothing but net. So next time you think of a net, go to that website and click yourself happy. Ten bucks means a kid might get to live. Make it $20 and more kids are saved.” Chambers began repeating a simplified version of Reilly’s message—“$10 buys a net, saves a child’s life”—like a mantra.
The UN Foundation, which had originally come up with the $10-a-bed-net campaign, took Reilly’s premise to the National Basketball Association and US Major League soccer authorities and, with funding from the Gates Foundation, created the Nothing But Nets campaign. The effect of streamlining the message was “massive,” says Fitzgerald. “It moved people, and it began seeping into pop culture.” American football players began backing the malaria campaign. Rock stars talked about it. So did actors. One eight-year-old girl from Pennsylvania, Katherine Commale, raised $100,000 for Nothing But Nets in three years.
The idea of linking malaria to something fun like sports appealed to Chambers. He had little time for traditional aid-group publicity drives. For decades, aid and development charities have followed a set format for, as industry jargon has it, “raising awareness”: an image of a destitute African child in some kind of distress, preferably in black and white, perhaps taken by an eminent war photographer, overlaid with a message demanding the reader forgo a trivial amount of money and save a baby. It was not an approach Chambers liked. It was depressing, and depression was niche. Far more engaging, he thought, was a cause presented as something people might like to join rather than something they ought. It should be enjoyable. And Chernin was in a position to help: News Corporation owned Fox, which happened to broadcast the biggest entertainment show on US television, the talent show American Idol. And so on April 24, 2007, Fox broadcast a special edition “Idol Gives Back.”
The show was put together by two Britons, Idol producer Simon Fuller and Richard Curtis, director of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love Actually and producer of the biennial British telethon Comic Relief. Like Chambers, Curtis was tired of presenting Africa as a place of continuous calamity. “I’ve worked for twenty years on TV programs that fund-raise for Africa,” he says, “and always, because we’re trying to move people into giving money, we’ve had to concentrate on some of the harshest things.” That image making had worked too well, said Curtis. People thought Africa was hopeless, and that was both unhelpful and inaccurate. “I once read a statistic that people in Africa, when asked if they are happy, are more likely to answer yes than people in Europe or the US. I also believe that if people can really believe in the rich, normal life of people in Africa, we won’t be happy to have millions die there.”15 Fuller was also pleased to come on board. As a boy, he had direct experience of malaria. “My father contracted malaria during his time as a pilot in Burma during the Second World War and would often talk of its consequences,” he says. “And I lived in Ghana for five years as a child, and malaria and its consequences were an everyday reality for me. So I understood the importance of prevention and medical care needed to combat malaria at a very early age.”16
Malaria was a serious subject, and “Idol Gives Back” had serious moments. Presenters Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell recorded short sequences of themselves traveling in Africa and sleeping under a net in a village. But its main attraction was a show-business lineup that was all but unprecedented. Fronting the two-hour special with Seacrest was Ellen DeGeneres. Stars who appeared included actors Kevin Bacon, Antonio Banderas, Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Hugh Grant, Goldie Hawn, Keira Knig
htley, Hugh Laurie, Rob Lowe, Ewan McGregor, Helen Mirren, Gwyneth Paltrow, Miss Piggy, and the Simpsons. Musicians included the Black Eyed Peas, Bono, Michael Bublé, Annie Lennox, and Madonna. Celine Dion performed a duet with a hologram of Elvis Presley.
Among the 26.4 million Americans who tuned in, ensuring “Idol Gives Back” topped the ratings, were hundreds of bloggers. Their breathless reviews provide an illuminating snapshot of how Curtis and Fuller managed to make compulsive entertainment out of a deadly disease. On a website called Wild Bluff Media, “Matt” wrote:Ben Stiller comes on and does some good jokes about all the movies he’s been in. Next he lets us know that he plans to sing non-stop until the show has raised $200 billion. He’s actually going to sing the very same song the entire time. Please, donate now to help stop Ben. Ryan and Simon return in their video to the children and families they visited on their trip to Africa. One of the young children they visit is a 12-year-old boy who lost both parents and is now the leader of his family. It’s a very sad story and is really motivating to support the cause. Our first results reveal for the night is with Melinda Doolittle and . . . she is safe. No kidding. Of course she is, she’s great! Paula’s video gives us a tour of a Boys & Girls Club. Il Divo is the next group up. Guess who founded this group?? That’s right, Simon Cowell did! Sheesh. Shameless plugging of your own stuff during a charity event. The important message from this part though is that every 3 seconds a child dies in extreme poverty. Alright, Jack Black is on stage! Awesome! Another video highlights the rapid death rate in Africa. So many children are dying from malaria every day. A packet of medicine costing only $2 can save the lives of four children. One such child that our camera crew comes across and drives to the hospital is not so fortunate and dies before they can get there. 50 cents worth of medicine would have saved that baby. It’s a crushing situation to see. Kelly Clarkson is up next and gives an amazing performance.17
The money poured in. News Corporation pledged to donate 10 cents for every vote made to the show for the first fifty million calls—up to $5 million—while its MySpace arm created a special profile page for the event. Donations from viewers were accepted by phone and online, and by May 1 the final total collected was more than $75 million. More important to Chambers than the money was how American Idol leveraged a new profile for malaria. “Before Idol, only 20 percent of the US saw malaria as a current health crisis,” he said. “That went up to over 50 percent.”
The goal of the new campaign was initially open-ended: save lives. On October 17, 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates gathered three hundred scientists and funders together in Seattle with the intention of refining that. There had already been rumblings among malariologists and epidemiologists about what their well-meaning and well-funded but, in the view of many, underqualified leaders were going to ask of them. More than a few cynics were openly mocking Chambers’s choice of name for his organization, while Melinda Gates’s comments at the White House summit—that “wiping out malaria could join the eradication of smallpox as one of the greatest achievements in human history”—had been studiously ignored.
Bill and Melinda Gates were determined that would not happen again. “Advances in science and medicine, promising research, and the rising concern of people around the world represent an historic opportunity not just to treat malaria or to control it—but to chart a long-term course to eradicate it,” Melinda Gates told the scientists. Lest anyone was in any doubt, Bill underscored the new ambition: “We will not stop working until malaria is eradicated.” 18 For a second time, the world would be taking on malaria. This time, the aim was to wipe it off the planet forever.
CHAPTER 7
Global Network
Bill and Melinda Gates had set the goal of eradicating the disease. But who was going to lead the fight? Chambers suggested to WHO director-general Margaret Chan that she put herself forward. Chan disagreed. She had all the world’s diseases on her plate—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, swine flu, avian flu, SARS, dengue, cholera, river blindness, and Ebola, as well as malaria. She couldn’t concentrate on just one, and that’s what malaria needed. “You should be the first UN special envoy for Malaria,” she told Chambers. She made the same suggestion to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon. “You could see Ray was the guy to get this done,” she says.1
Chambers was unsure about taking a job at the UN. “I just wanted to keep working on what I was doing,” he says.2 Basu, who had left the World Bank to join Malaria No More as its managing director in October 2007, remembers discussing the issue with Chambers. “The two of us debated. Ray doesn’t like press or giving speeches, and he really didn’t want to be bound by the rules and regulations of the UN. On the plus side, he was trying to achieve such a wholesale change in the way that you approach aid that there was no way he could do it as chair of a small NGO in the US, no matter how rich he was.”3
Chambers decided the title of special envoy would give him and malaria the standing—and the leverage—both needed. Ban Ki-Moon was enthused about the possibilities a businesslike approach might offer. A meeting was scheduled between the two at the UN building in New York. “It was a good discussion, and Ray accepted,” says Basu, “and then as a last order of business they asked Ray to agree to the terms of reference for the job, and handed him a five-page document that said: ‘Ray Chambers will do X, Y, and Z, the WHO will do X, Y, and Z to help Ray Chambers. We will have this many meetings with the WHO to agree on which countries we would target, the WHO/UN will agree to finance four trips a year, business class for the special envoy, etc., etc., etc.’ And Ray said: ‘What the hell is this? This doesn’t exist in my world.’ He told me: ‘It’s your job to get rid of all this. All I want is something that says: Ray Chambers will do everything in his power to end malaria.’” Basu laughs. “So I call the secretary-general’s office and tell them this is a special envoy not like other special envoys. And we negotiate the terms down to Ray Chambers doing his utmost to end deaths from malaria and the UN supporting him with a salary of $1 a year. It was worlds colliding.”
In February 2008, Ban Ki-Moon announced Chambers’s appointment as the first UN special envoy for malaria. One of the biggest and most ambitious campaigns ever undertaken by the aid world would be led by a Wall Street millionaire whose background and methods made him, at first glance, anathema to almost everyone in that world. On April 9, a second “Idol Gives Back” with a similarly star-studded cast—this time also including presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Blair’s successor as British prime minister, Gordon Brown—raised another $64 million. 4 And if anyone doubted a sea change was under way, on April 25, World Malaria Day, at the UN Building in New York, Ban Ki-Moon announced that not only was eradication of malaria the goal but as a first step his new special envoy would oversee the global distribution of a bed net to everyone in the world who needed one by the end of 2010, a timeframe of a little more than two and a half years. This was a “bold but achievable” vision, said Ban. The burden of the disease was “unacceptable—all the more so because malaria is preventable and treatable.” Writing in the Guardian newspaper, he added: “We have the resources and the know-how. But we have less than 1,000 days before the end of 2010. So let’s get to work.”5
Chambers recognized he had just been set one of the most intimidating aid targets ever attempted. “People said: ‘This is just another one of those goals that people put out and which they have no chance of meeting,’” he said. It wasn’t only the number of bed nets that was daunting. Chambers was going to be cajoling Western donors to part with billions, persuading African presidents that this was in their interest, convincing prickly aid workers to surrender themselves to his plan when most of them considered it unworkable—and him untouchable on principle—and then pushing them hard to implement it. He would be trying to coordinate a motley crew of independent partners: the Global Fund, the President’s Malaria Initiative, the Gates Foundation, the WHO, UNICEF, Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), and UNITAID, a UN agency spec
ializing in innovative aid finance. And he would be attempting all this without formally controlling any of the money or the people it would take to do it. If he were to have any hope of success, Chambers would need some unusual skills in the people around him.
Chambers already had Suprotik Basu, known to his colleagues as “Protik.” A thirty-two-year-old graduate in health economics from Johns Hopkins University, Basu had been a health and development specialist at the World Bank for six years. After Wolfowitz became Bank president in March 2005, the former US deputy secretary of defense had made alleviation of poverty in Africa a priority and malaria a focus of that effort. Basu was part of a malaria team that reported directly to Wolfowitz every quarter. He found Wolfowitz and his ability to focus a large organization like the Bank on a single issue impressive. “He was one of the more intimidating and bright guys I have ever worked with,” says Basu. “And when I met Ray in New York as he was getting involved in malaria, there was a lot that I applied to him from Paul, about what can happen when you have a really strong leader with skin in the game.” In October 2007, Basu asked his World Bank bosses for two years’ leave. “I just told them: ‘I really want to do this. I really think we could do something.’” His bosses were more than supportive. Three years later, Basu would muse: “I’m actually still technically on leave from the Bank.”
