This week, Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program is being featured on the BBC World Service. Broadcasting in 32 languages around the world, the BBC World Service reached an average weekly listenership of 183 million people in 2007. Project Muso is featured as part of a story on the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a new foundation that is one of the supporters of Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program as a model effort.

Malaria kills one million people each year, most of them children. A child younger than 5 dies from malaria every 42 seconds. The Community Based Malaria Program aims to stop deaths from malaria and strengthen Mali’s primary health care system. Our program uses three strategies: 1) training Community Health Workers to find, diagnose, and treat cases of malaria in the home, and to bring cases of severe malaria and other illnesses immediately to the health center 2) providing free health care for those who cannot afford to pay, through a Solidarity Fund and 3) building the capacity of the Malian government health care system, by training physicians and nurses, constructing and equipping a new clinical care center, and renovating existing infrastructure.

The BBC World Service story on the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s support for Project Muso focuses on the “Community Based” aspect of our malaria program, through which Project Muso collaborates with community leaders, including religious leaders, to support our Community Health Workers in reaching out to the poorest, most marginalized community members and ensuring that they have access to the health care that is their right. The piece also discusses the Faiths Act Fellows, a group of young leaders of different religions from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States who will come to Mali to study Project Muso’s model for integrating malaria treatment and primary care, and then return to their respective countries to work toward building a global movement to eradicate malaria.

You can listen to the BBC story on the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and Project Muso at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p002ysbx . The portion about Project Muso begins about 8 minutes into the piece.