| May 27, 2010
A collaborative malaria prevention and awareness program sponsored by The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation has been honored with a Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GBC) Partnership Award.
NetsforLife® is a partnership of The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, the ExxonMobil Foundation, Standard Chartered Bank, Starr International Foundation, the White Flowers Foundation and Episcopal Relief & Development. The program works closely with national malaria programs throughout Africa to train and mobilize thousands of volunteers, who in turn distribute insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets and teach people how and why to use them. They also explain how to recognize malaria symptoms.
To date, NetsforLife had distributed more than 2 million bed nets -- which dramatically reduce malaria transmission rates -- and trained nearly 10,000 volunteers in 17 countries.
Malaria kills nearly 1 million people each year in African communities, with 90 percent of these deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. Pregnant women and young children are disproportionately affected by the disease, which also costs $12 billion a year in lost productivity.
"Besides distributing nets and training people to work in communities with their friends, colleagues and neighbors on malaria prevention, NetsforLife has succeeded in instilling a 'net culture' in communities that were previously unaware of the benefits of sleeping under a long-lasting, insecticide-treated net," said William Asiko, President, The Coca-Cola Africa Foundation. "There is empirical evidence that thousands of lives of children under five have been saved by this intervention, which we are extremely proud to be a part of."
Read the news release. |
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