Letter From the UK (About Africa)

Capitalism is Eradicating Disease and Poverty

As the remarkable retreat of malaria across Africa shows, free trade is a very efficient way of spreading medicine and wealth

Daily Telegraph
Fraser Nelson


A Maasai warrior talks on a mobile phone in Kajiado, Kenya Photo: Joseph Van Os / Getty

Did you know that someone dies of malaria every 60 seconds? You may do, if you’ve seen one of the latest Christian Aid posters picturing an African girl staring fearfully at the camera, or a young boy lying on what seems to be his deathbed. They send a powerful Christmas message: while we celebrate in comfort, children are dying for want of a £3 mosquito net. And we could change this, if only we chose to help.

What these adverts don’t tell you, though, is the remarkable extent to which we are helping – and, more importantly, the way in which Africans are helping themselves. Malaria, mankind’s biggest killer, is now retreating faster than at any time since records began.

Earlier this month, the United Nations announced that malaria’s global death toll has more than halved since the turn of the century, saving six million lives. It’s the greatest success story of modern times, yet no one seems interested in telling it.
 The aid donations, the billion mosquito nets, the surge in proper testing – all form part of the picture. But so do the efforts of Africans themselves.
Malaria is losing the fight

Take Eritrea. In 1999, its health ministry mounted a comprehensive assault on malaria, taking insecticide-treated nets to villages so they could provide faster, better diagnosis and improved treatment.

Western donors helped to pay, but it was chiefly a matter of organisation and willpower that got things going. After little more than a decade, Eritrean malaria rates had fallen by 90 per cent.
This story has been repeated, to a greater or lesser degree, across the continent. At the turn of the century, barely 2 per cent of sub-Saharan Africans slept under mosquito nets. Now, 55 per cent do.
Save the Children’s winter appeal features a sad-looking boy from Congo and warns that “thousands of children like Kabeya will wake up sick with hunger” this Christmas.

This is quite true, but the world over, malnutrition rates stand at an all-time low and are falling fast. The stunning truth about Congo is that it has almost halved its extreme poverty rate in 10 years. In fact, across the world, poverty rates and child mortality rates have halved since 1990.  Back then, only 52 per cent of children in sub-Saharan Africa went to primary school. Now, 80 per cent do – and the number is rising.

This has been a landmark year for Africa. It’s the first year in history, for example, that no wild polio cases have been reported in the continent; a disease that used to strike and often paralyse 350,000 children a year is now almost extinct. Aids infections have halved over the past 15 years. The recent eradication of Ebola in Sierra Leone is only the latest triumph in Africa’s war against the kinds of diseases that have kept so many countries on their knees for so long.

While overseas support has been crucial and highly effective in the struggle, the strongest force pushing back disease in the continent is capitalism; trade still brings in far more money than aid. Indoor smoke, dirty water and hunger still kill more Africans than malaria, so when a villager can afford rudimentary sanitation and healthcare, the effect on disease is profound.

A recent African Union conference set a two-year deadline to turn the whole continent into a free-trade area. This is no mere fantasy: since the beginning of the century, the value of trade between African countries has risen five times over; mobile phones are now as common in Nigeria and South Africa as they are in Britain.  . . .

Bill Gates’s charitable foundation has played a full role in the battle against malaria. It does not rely on pulling heartstrings to gain support, so he is free of any need to spin a tale of Africa in meltdown. Instead, he talks about “mind-blowing” progress being made before our eyes. On current trends, he says, there will be almost no poor countries left within 20 years.

If this sounds like a wild exaggeration, it shouldn’t: all the data is pointing in this direction.
This is a story that is not told very often, but it is none the less the story of our age: globalisation is spreading ideas, medicine and wealth, forcing down inequality and bringing the world closer together.

With enough capitalism, poverty might become history after all.