Barrick Gold and the Touch Foundation – Joining Forces to Tackle Malaria

Tory Ervin: Forging a Public-Private Partnership for Malaria Control

I am spending the summer working as an attaché to the Touch Foundation at Barrick Gold Mining Company to assist Barrick in its malaria control program and to develop a partnership between Touch and Barrick in the Lake Zone region of northwestern Tanzania.

To give you a bit of context, Barrick Gold has 27 mines around the world, with four located in Tanzania. Barrick employs over 4,300 people in Tanzania alone. Having spent most of my working years at nonprofits and in the Peace Corps in Kenya, understanding how the mining industry operates and how it can invest in local communities through health, education and microfinance initiatives has been invaluable.

So, why malaria, you might ask? The Lake Zone, where the Barrick mines are located is mostly rural, and has some of the worst malaria rates in the country. For instance, in some parts of the Lake Zone, the prevalence rate is 39%, compared to 1.2% in Dar es Salaam. In Tanzania each year around 12 million people suffer from malaria, and over 20,000 people die from this preventable disease.

Malaria has a severe impact on the workforce at Barrick mine sites and in the communities surrounding the mines. I have been working with Barrick to strengthen their malaria control programs through their three-pronged approach:

• creating a robust indoor residual spraying program with the local and national governments;
• developing materials for malaria information and education campaigns; and
• coordinating with the government’s Catch-up Campaign to distribute bed nets to every household in Tanzania with a pregnant woman or a child under five years.

While Barrick’s aim is to build this program out with the government to all of Kahama District (covering ~800,000 people), malaria will likely remain a cause of illness and death at Bugando Medical Centre – the second largest hospital in Tanzania – until prevalence and incidence rates drop throughout the entire Lake Zone. The Touch Foundation has been working in the Lake Zone since 2004 to strengthen and support the Bugando medical school and hospital there. Currently, malaria is the leading cause of death in Bugando’s pediatric ward, and accounts for almost 24 percent of all outpatient cases. Many complications during childbirth are attributable to women who do not receive proper malaria prophylaxis (preventative) care during pregnancy and suffer from anemia before and during pregnancy.

It is frustrating to know that with increased access to education about malaria prevention, better localized diagnostic services, and an improved drug distribution system, fewer people would be dying from this treatable disease.

My experience this summer has underscored the importance of the Touch Foundation’s work to expand health worker training and strengthen health care, and the benefits of working with partners such as Barrick to increase medical access and services to people who need it. To tackle malaria, we will need all hands on deck!

Steve Kisakye: Barrick’s Take on Community Health

I came to know the Touch Foundation through my work as Barrick Gold’s Community Health Coordinator in Tanzania. My work involves many things, but at its core is the development of strategic partnerships to ensure that the workforce at all Barrick operations in Tanzania go home healthy each day and that the host communities in which we live and work have access to quality health care.

These health partnerships focus on:

-         combating HIV/AIDS and malaria,

-         increasing the capacity of local health centers,

-         facilitating the provision of dental services,

-         training peer health educators in the community,

-         facilitating access to surgery for rural residents,

-         establishing access to secure water supplies.

We are doing the majority of this through our newly established Lake Zone Health Initiative, one that fits well with Touch’s own Lake Zone Initiative. Both programmes share a common goal – to increase health access and delivery to the Tanzanian people.

Given the prevalence rates here in Tanzania, one of our major priorities is tackling malaria, as it is by far the biggest health risk for our employees and local community members. By way of illustration, in 2008, Barrick Tanzania lost over 1,400 work days due to malaria. Our mine site teams have done excellent work in dealing with the malaria challenge through initiatives including distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, effective case management and dissemination of prevention messages; at the same time we continuously look for innovative solutions to tackle the malaria challenge. As such, in collaboration with the District Health authorities in Kahama District, we have been developing a comprehensive malaria control program based on Indoor Residual Spraying. This is a pilot project focused on the community around Bulyanhulu, our largest mine site in Tanzania. The program will also include mentoring of health care providers working in the government hospitals near the mine in effective case management. It will also involve revamped efforts to deliver effective malaria control messages to the community.

Given the health challenges in Tanzania, the development of effective challenges is the most effective way in which the private sector can assist in the provision of sustainable health care programs and facilities. Leveraging resources and key competencies to form public-private partnerships is one powerful part of the solution as is being demonstrated by the Touch Foundation’s work with government institutions and Barrick in Tanzania.