MBU WA KIKE ANAYEAMBUKIZA MALARIA
Eleven of Africa’s major football federations commit to help kick malaria out of Central and Eastern Africa
KIGALI, RWANDA – MAY 22ND, 2010: With eleven leading African teams gathering in Kigali for the CECAFA Kagame Club Cup, the game’s top administrators in the region used the occasion to announce that CECAFA, the body representing eleven national football federations, has committed to using its influence to help reduce the impact of malaria and ensure their players are protected from malaria. CECAFA made this pledge as part of their commitment in joining the United Against Malaria partnership.
The Council of East and Central Africa Football Associations (CECAFA) counts Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Zanzibar, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi and Djibouti as members. These countries have a combined population of over 260 million people with 38.9 million combined reported malaria cases and over 209,000 deaths, comprising nearly a quarter of all malaria deaths on the continent.
“Players from our region such as McDonald Mariga and Denis Olliech are starting to break through in top European leagues as leading footballers,” said CECAFA President Leodegar Tenga. “We want to one day soon produce a Tanzanian Messi or a Rwandan Ronaldo and we want to challenge the top international teams, but to do so we need to have a healthy community, one that is free from malaria.”
CECAFA will urge the national federations to undertake a range of activities to help reduce the malaria burden, including producing public service announcements, dedicating advertising space around big football tournaments and engaging business and political leaders to play their part. One of the main objectives will be to get across important messages to children and heads of households to sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria and to quickly get the right treatment at the first sign of the disease by using national team footballers as role models.
“Mosquitoes don’t respect borders so it makes sense for us as a council, representing football associations from eleven countries severely affected by malaria, to work together and do what we can,” said Nicholas Musonye, General Secretary of CECAFA. “We will work together with each other, the national malaria control programmes and local partners in each of our countries to do anything we can to help meet our objectives of ending malaria deaths by 2015.”
CECAFA joins the national federations of Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia in contributing to the campaign, along with Ireland and the US. Leading African players such as Kolo Toure and Michael Essien, both of whom have suffered from malaria, have also shot public service announcements for the campaign.
The United Against Malaria partnership is bringing together global health organizations, governments, corporations and football teams ahead of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa to help reach the United Nations target of universal access to mosquito nets and malaria medicine in Africa by the end of 2010, a crucial first step to reaching the international target of reducing malaria deaths to near zero by 2015.
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