In 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic foundation established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, announced an ambitious, long-term goal: to eradicate malaria worldwide, rather than just keeping it under control, as had been the prevailing policy for decades. Many thought the goal was overly ambitious. An earlier attempt to eradicate the disease in the late 1950s had failed. The call came at a challenging time. Malaria was killing more than 1 million people a year, most of them children. Deaths from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa had doubled over the prior 20 years as the malaria parasite grew resistant to existing drugs, and as the mosquitos that carry the disease grew resistant to insecticides. The Gates Foundation backed up its call to arms with a commitment to invest $860 million to malaria programs, and another $650 million to support the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

With a clear, long-term goal in place, the Gates Foundation needed to develop a set of strategies to attain this goal. The Foundation knew only too well that simply throwing money at the problem would not lead to a solution. Besides, even an organization like the Gates Foundation, which is the world's largest private charity, has limited resources and many different requests for funding. The foundation needed to make very clear choices about how it allocated its limited resources in order to have maximum effect and help win the war against malaria. To aid in this process, it hired scientists and public health experts to help evaluate requests for funding.

As it developed over the next few years, the foundation's strategy had several elements. First, it committed funds to promising efforts to develop a vaccine for malaria. Second, realizing that many malaria carriers are asymptomatic, the foundation backed efforts to developing better diagnostic tests that could be used quickly and efficiently in poor regions so that carriers in a population could be identified and treated. Third, it funded efforts to develop new drugs to treat those with malaria. These drugs represented an effort to respond to the rise of drug resistant malaria parasites. Fourth, it sought to fund the development of more effective transmission control tools such as insecticide treated bed nets and indoor spraying of walls and other surfaces with an insecticide. Finally, realizing that it could do far more with the support and cooperation of national governments and multi-national institutions, the foundation used its resources to advocate for better funding and more effective policies, and it partnered proactively with national gov-ernment in affected areas to help them develop more effective policies.

How much progress has the foundation made? In 2016, malaria claimed 429,000 lives. While that figure is still way too high, it represented a 50% reduction overall from the diseases peak in the early 2000s. The Gates Foundation's malaria strategy is evolving. Bill Gates is the first to admit that some of its goals were too ambitious. Early on, he thought we would have a malaria vaccine by now. While that hasn't happened, a promising vaccine is now in development. Equally notable, some low technology and inexpensive strategies have proved to be very successful, such as giving away insecticide treated bed nets and placing mosquito traps in ventilation airways between the walls and rooks of buildings.

1. Why has The Gates Foundation seen success in eradicating malaria when previous attempts were not successful?
2. Imagine you are the chair of the missions committee at your local church. What first strategic steps might you take to partner in the work The Gates Foundation is doing to fight this disease? How does the faith component of your work impact your decision-making process?