Faces of Change

There are African voices that you don’t hear in sound bites, whose faces you don’t see in photos of disease and despair. These voices and faces are unheard and unseen in the popular press but speak with great strength and hope. They belong to African professionals who carry out the day-to-day work of science and medicine under difficult circumstances and with limited resources. The malaria researchers you will meet in the excerpts to follow represent a sample of some 40 individuals I interviewed as part of my work with the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria. I wanted participants to tell their own stories about the choices they have made to work in their countries, choices that, when taken together, affect the future health of Africa, where a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.Figure 1Isabella QuakyiIsabella Quakyi, PhD, has returned home to Accra, Ghana, to carry on her teaching and research after nearly a 20-year absence during which she was based in the United States. Wilfred Mbacham, PhD, left Yaounde, Cameroon, to complete his education and is now back, devoted to encouraging young people in science and working in public health. Andrew Githeko, PhD, describes how Internet connectivity has brought him into the world of international research and allowed him to work effectively in a remote, malarious area of Kenya.