Dancing to stop malaria: as good as bednets?

For a couple of weeks now, the (non-)progression of the story of the girls abducted from Chibok in Nigeria's Borno state has been winging its way around my blogroll. It's a pretty horrific one: on April 15, Boko Haram gunmen attacked the town and kidnapped between 85 and 235 girls, and have allegedly sold some of them into slavery in Cameroon. Within Nigeria this has naturally received a lot of attention, and in Abuja on Sunday they protested at the government's inaction. As is the case depressingly often though, this kind of story from an African country didn't initially get all that much airtime in much Western media, but apparently we've reached the tipping point according to Africaisacountry. [In fact, I wrote that intro on Sunday and now the story has definitely reached the mainstream; when Michelle Obama gives it the hashtag treatment, you know the shit has hit the fan]

So I read the articles. I try to empathise, to the limited extent that I can put myself in the shoes of a Nigerian guy whose sister has been abducted by terrorists. I retweet. I sign the change.org petition. My awareness is raised.

On April 25, Tom Murphy, my favourite of Humanosphere's two Toms, put out an article about a MobMalaria, "a global, student-run project to raise awareness of malaria and its eradication efforts through fun," according to its website. The idea was to organise identical flashmobs in Harare, Changsha (China) and Cambridge (USA). In Harare, according to the Harvard Crimson, they tailored the event to include guidance on prevention and other local concerns. In Cambridge (USA), they danced about malaria for four minutes. In Tom's words, "The impact...on the students at Harvard is yet to be determined".

Fighting malaria at Harvard. credit: www.defeatingmalaria.harvard.edu

Let me first say that I'm not trying to belittle either the global effort to reduce malaria (627 000 deaths in 2012) or the campaign to bring back the kidnapped girls. In fact, the key message from this article so far is that political mobilisation (Nigeria) and locally-tailored efforts to solve problems (Zimbabwe) seem like pretty good ways to address these issues respectively.

But as for the rest (can't keep this in any longer), dancing about malaria?! And in my own case, a retweet and an online signature?! Where is chain of events leading to change in either of those situations? The chance that my retweet or change.org signature will persuade Abubakar Shekau, leader of Boko Haram, to rethink his considered opinion that "in Islam, it is allowed to take infidel women as slaves," or to persuade President Goodluck Jonathan to take time from feting his daughter with golden iphones to seriously address the situation in Chibok, is slim. Even more unlikely is a flashmob persuading a mosquito not to bite someone. Teju Cole captures the awareness-raising-as-hot-air point pithily: ' "What can I do to help [in the Chibok girls case]?" Unless you're a Nigerian with constitutional rights to participate in Nigeria's democratic process: almost nothing'. Mark Leon Goldberg is similarly wary about the current wave of Twitter activism. And sometimes achieving almost nothing isn't the worst part: the MobMalaria's idea involved loads of students in a rich country downloading instructions onto their ipods to supposedly check the progress of malaria, a disease mostly affecting the poor... I mean you've got to have a bit of self-awareness.

Reigning in my pot-shots to just student development/global health 'awareness-raising' groups, I myself have experienced their stealthy pull, almost firing off an application to the World Conference on Youth 2014 designed to 'mainstream youth in the post-2015 agenda'. A chance to proceed 'directly to Go' and change the world, courtesy of my unique perspective as one of only 3.5 billion people worldwide under the age of 30, with free return flights to Colombo as an extra kickback. Likewise on Twitter I followed a load of youth-led global health/development groups the other week so I could rage with jealousy at their 'success' in establishing themselves in the 'world-changing' industry.

WCY2014: where I have little right to be
(resisted temptation to put in a Kony meme instead)

I think I was wasting my rage. The burden of proof is on awareness-raising groups to show they have a concrete impact, over and above boosting their own self-esteem (and careers: apparently the MobMalaria founders will be spending this summer employed as "social media specialists for the Harvard Global Health Institute," which shows the campaign has had some impact at least). In the case of MobMalaria, we shall wait and see.

In the meantime, I guess I'll go find some online petitions to sign.


ps. Naturally the Onion has something brilliant on this: How Can We Raise Awareness In Darfur Of How Much We're Doing For Them?