Billionaire Bill Gates is confident malaria will be eradicated in his lifetime. And reputable aid organizations continue to pat themselves on the backs for scaling up their efforts to provide life-saving nets to prevent the disease’s spread.
But, on-the-ground investigations have found that when people in many African countries don’t have access to food or adequate information about malaria, they’re often inclined to use those very nets for an assortment of other activities. Fishermen in several countries, including Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia, cast the nets into the water to catch food, and kids often tie them to posts to use them as soccer goals, The New York Times reported.
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“Our life is hard. We suffer a lot,” Juma Saidi, a fisherman, told The Times. “That’s why we use this…to find survival here. So that we can get something to eat.”
