How to respond to turmoil in the global energy sector!

Dear Colleagues

The increasing turmoil in the oil producing countries around the world has huge risks for the continuing improvement of the US economy. To maintain profits and cash flow, many companies will very soon cut back on their investments, and consumers will cut back all they can on their consumption. It is not time for the same old same old, but time to move into a post-cheap_energy society that presently exists and get ready for tomorrow!

The following came in my email today. It was an idea used a little bit a couple of years back. Someone responded to the idea ... also below, and I have responded as well. The third item below!

THIS IS NOT THE 'DON'T BUY' GAS FOR ONE DAY, BUT IT WILL SHOW YOU HOW WE CAN GET GAS BACK DOWN TO $1.30 PER GALLON.

This was sent by a retired Coca Cola executive. It came from one of his engineer buddies who retired from Halliburton. If you are tired of the gas prices going up AND they will continue to rise this summer, take time to read this please.

Phillip Hollsworth offered this good idea. This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the "don't buy gas on a certain day" campaign that was going around last April or May! It's worth your consideration. Join the resistance!!!!

I hear we are going to hit close to $ 4.00 a gallon by next summer and it might go higher!! Want gasoline prices to come down?

We need to take some intelligent, united action. The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to "hurt" ourselves by refusing to buy gas .

It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can Really work. Please read on and join with us!

By now you're probably thinking gasoline priced at about $2.00 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $3.08 at Arco and Costco for regular unleaded in Salem , Oregon and climbing every week.

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50 - $1.75, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace..not sellers.

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action.

The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.

How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying gas.

But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.

Here's the idea: For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL.

If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Exxon and Mobil gas buyers. It's really simple to do! Now, don't wimp out on me at this point...keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to 30 people. If each of us send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000)... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth group of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers .
If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

If it goes one level further, you guessed it..... THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all!

(If you don't understand how we can reach 300 million and all you have to do is send this to 10 people.... Well, let's face it, you just aren't a mathematician But I am . so trust me on this one.

How long would all that take? If each of us sends this e-mail out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!

I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you! Acting together we can make a difference.

If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on. I suggest that we not buy from EXXON/MOBIL UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $2.00 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.

Someone responded to this as follows. I was delighted to see someone looking hard at the issues in a more comprehensive way. I have not shown his name at this juncture, but hope to be in contact with him soon.

Dear xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is an excellent plan.

Unfortunately, though, its basic premise is misguided. Low gas prices are exactly the opposite of what we need. We will not rid ourselves of our dependency on this non-renewable, environmentally disastrous resource by focusing our efforts on driving down its prices. Continued reliance on hydrocarbon fuels is a losers game.

The only way to really change things is to accelerate work on finding more efficient, cleaner, and more renewable energy sources. As long as we keep gas prices low, there is little motivation for entrepreneurs and large energy companies to do so. What we need to do is help create an economic environment in which it makes sense to invest in the new and better energy technologies.

For consumers to be motivated by exactly the same kind of short-term, self-interested thinking that they abhor in industry is folly. It's like the luddites smashing looms.

Following the action plan proposed by Ms Mates may produce short term relief, but it is sure to produce long term grief.

I urge you to think it through.

Signed xxxxx

I have responded as follows. My response has some of the perspective that is built into TrueValueMetrics.

Dear Colleagues

Thank you, xxxxx for raising this question. The United States, and to a lesser extent Europe have created extremely energy intensive societies at the same time that they have created amazing innovations in productivity.

Sadly the metrics that are used to measure progress of society are fatally flawed. Corporate performance is simply money profit, with society better when it is bigger ... higher GDP, more consumption, higher stock market ... etc etc.

But society really is about quality of life ... happiness, reduced worry, family and friends, jobs, income, retirement, safety and security, good health, good education, good opportunities, beauty, spiritual support, etc. The metrics for this are conspicuously absent from the everyday dialog about economic and business performance.

In a responsible society there would be a financial reserve set aside so that we have the funding for energy when the FREE oil resources are gone. Norway is doing this. Kuwait has been doing this since the 1970s which explains why they had the money to pay the USA and others to get Iraq out of their country in the early 1990s! But the USA runs on low price energy that cannot last. The emergence of China and India as middle class economies changes the demand equation ... and people's democracy in most of the oil producing countries will change the supply equation. If there is war in the oil producing areas then supply equation is even more compromised.

The oil industry engineers are technologically amazing ... but they are not good corporate citizens for the United States, the places where they operate or the planet as a whole. They can find and exploit new resources better now than in the past, but they are merely facilitating more rapid consumption of these finite limited resources. Their profits and payout to their stockholders are based on accounting that puts ZERO cost on the oil in the ground. The reality is that these zero cost natural resources have taken a zillion years to produce, and one day we will have to be doing that in real time to have energy equilibrium for the planet.

Does this matter? You bet it does. In my own little way I want to see better metrics so that the real issues that we ought to be facing are in play!

Peter Burgess
truevaluemetrics.org
http://truevaluemetrics.blogspot.com

Income distribution in China worse than in the USA?

Dear Colleagues

Someone suggested that I should read an article about income distribution posted on the Roubini website. I do not have access to the whole article but the start is not promising. The URL is:
http://www.roubini.com/analyst-monitor/260596/just_how_rich_is_the_national_people___s_congress_

I sense from the title of the article ... Just How Rich Is the National People’s Congress? ... and the first small snippet of the main text that the idea is that the fact of huge wealth in among the governing elite in China makes the situation in the United States quite desirable. This is absolute hogwash.

Here is the snippet of text.

Just How Rich Is the National People’s Congress?
Adam Wolfe Mar 4, 2011 6:04PM
A Bloomberg News article from Michael Forsythe on China’s National People’s Congress is making waves today. Coming on the heels of the failed “Jasmine Revolution” in China, the article seeks to show that the NPC is representative of the widening income gap in China.

The richest 70 of the 2,987 members have a combined wealth of 493.1 billion yuan ($75.1 billion), and include China’s richest man, Hangzhou Wahaha Group Chairman Zong Qinghou, according to the research group Hurun Report. By comparison, the wealthiest 70 people in the 535-member U.S. House and Senate, who represent a country with about 10 times China’s per-capita income, had a maximum combined wealth of $4.8 billion, data from the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics show.

In my view, the success of China is much more about many millions of very poor Chinese becoming somewhat better off. In the process the elite has also become very very rich, which is the way the enterprise system tends to work.

But the problem in the United States is that while the poor Chinese are moving up the economic ladder, the once rich Amnerican middle class is moving down the economic ladder. In absolute terms Americans are wealthy by world standards ... but they are incredible concerned about the direction of the American economy.

Until American leaders ... and that includes corporate and financial sector leaders ... take the jobs issue seriously, the USA is in trouble. President Obama cannot be a lone voice talking about jobs, when every institution in the USA is doing all it can to handle its own "agenda". Republicans in Congress have a focus on cutting government spending even though it has been government spending that successfully saved the USA and the global economy from catastrophe after many years of regulatory failure, greed and a whole lot more.

Corporate leaders have done a good job for their stockholders building back profitability ... but in the process there have been jobs lost with a huge impact on US quality of life. But that is not a corporate responsibility ... a corporate management team has responsibility to its stockholders ... and this might well be a fact of law ... but it is a bad situation for society.

And the dialog about taxation does not help. The argument goes that lower taxes stimulate the economy and create jobs ... but again taxes can be legally reduced in many different ways, but government services cannot be paid for without appropriate levels of revenue. The first job in corporate social responsibility (CSR) must be for a company to pay the right amount of taxes.

Government has a responsibility to spend money wisely, and it is true to say that there has been profligate spending in good times and then crisis job cutting in bad times. There is blame for this both on the side of the government and also on the side of the workers and their unions. But there is another issue, and that is the accounting used in government and the public sector. Most of the accounting is cash based rather than accrual based, and the balance sheets that are so important in corporate accounting really do not exist in the public sector. This means that the dialog around matters like current wages and future pensions are not included in any rigorous accounting, and over years this has become a terrible problem. Many unionized public employees are going to get great pensions that have to be paid for ... but the decisions that made this problem go back a very long time.

The concentration of wealth in China is a problem for the Chinese. The wealth differentials in the USA are different, but are also bad. Sorting it out is going to be difficult, but it must be done.

TrueValueMetrics will help because of its focus on value and the importance of a value balance sheet for all the actors in society!

Peter Burgess

The motion is 'Clean Energy Can Drive America's Economic Recovery?'

Dear Colleagues

I would like to share this note with you. I have been contacted in connection with attending an Intelligence Squared Debate in New York. I decided that a quick note to the organizers was in order, since while the premise of the debate is interesting, it fails to address the reality that no matter how much this agenda is promoted, it will be subsumed by all sorts of other issues with bigger financial and political import.

My bottom line, as always is simply that you manage what you measure ... and nothing that is of vital importance is being measured by the key institutions engaged in policy formulation and decision making, and accordingly there is a serious disaster in the making. This is what I wrote:

Dear Colleagues

Thank you for inviting me to come to the next of your debates. The motion is 'Clean Energy Can Drive America's Economic Recovery?'

I am very interested in the topic and have been for a long time ... but the current dialog about this and many other important issues really disappoints me.

There are huge opportunities but most of the time the dialog misses the point. If one starts off with the premise that technology is now more productive by an order of magnitude or two or more ... that is resource use effective ... then the progress of modern society on a global basis is rather pathetic. There are real reasons for this, notably that leadership has made poor decisions over and over again and the high powered high profile analysts and the dialog in the media avoids looking at this.

The prevailing metrics that are the starting point are fatally flawed. Most decision making ... that is allocation of resource ... metrics are simply about money and profit, about GDP growth and about the performance of the capital markets. These have some importance, but other metrics have importance as well, such as the progress in improving quality of life and issue regarding sustainability.

There are a number of well known people who have highlighted the issues around economic metrics besides myself. The huge mistakes that get made by investors and macro-economic managers as they focus on profit and growth without looking hard at the socio-economic and sustainability dimensions make it difficult to be optimistic about any future for the American economy. If profit, measured as it is now, is the only goal then the corporate community will use low cost workers and as a result will leave the American economy a hollowed out shell. The government will be asked to help unemployed more and more and more ... and it is not inconceivable that there will eventually be economic revolution in the US just as there is now in North Africa and the Middle East.

A value construct would change the trajectory of the US economy in meaningful ways. The profit one will send the US economy over the cliff ... essentially the same cliff that almost consumed the US just over two years ago.

Green jobs can make a huge difference to the United States and the world ... but it is a value construct that is an essential prerequisite in order for decision makers who have resources to flow funds into that segment of the economy. Neither the media nor the well-known academics, economists and policy analysts seem to have any deep understanding of this ... and it scares me to death.

Peter Burgess
truevaluemetrics.org

//////////////////////////////////////////
These are points make FOR and AGAINST the motion
FOR
** The current administration expects its clean energy policies to generate 800,000 jobs over the next two years, laying the foundation for lasting economic growth.
** Consumers can save billions of dollars relying on clean energy sources and increasing energy efficiency, leaving more money to be spent on other goods and services.
** Major investment in clean energy will lead to innovation and new technology.
** Reducing dependence on imported energy frees us to spend our limited resources domestically and protects us from fluctuations in oil prices and climate change.
AGAINST
** The Department of Energy’s own job creation estimates are far more modest than those of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
** A significant portion of clean energy funding has gone to foreign companies who have the advantage of having been heavily subsidized by their own governments for a number of years.
** Clean energy jobs face the same problems any other industry faces--competition from cheap foreign labor.
** A real green economy wouldn’t rely on government regulation and taxpayer financed subsidies.

____________
Peter Burgess
Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society
www.truevaluemetrics.org
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Of course, there is a lot more to say ... but what bothers me is that most of the people that engage in the dialog avoid the core issue of unbelievable waste of available resources while bemoaning the lack of resources that are in short supply. Nothing is going to change until profit is diminished in importance and value adding is increased in importance.

I see obscene waste when 10 or 15 million capable workers are unemployed in the USA. The reason for this is that there is not enough profit in putting these workers on a payroll to do the many things that need to be done. The economy needs a better infrastructure ... but how to profit from this. Not easy, but commuters lose millions ... billions of hours a year wasting time in traffic jams ... that comes free within the prevailing system of socio-economic metrics. If there are 15 million unemployed workers (say $400 a week) that is like throwing away about $4 billion a week of lost economic product. Actually it is worse than this because social costs go up when unemployment is elevated. Nothing will change as long as the corporate community can make no money from employing these people ... and nothing will change as long as the public sector is constrained by all sorts of rules about what they can and can not do with the budget ... and I might add, when there is no value balance sheet to hold government authorities accountable for their decision making.

It is a mess ... but TrueValueMetrics is a methodology that can help.

Stay tuned ... the truevaluemetrics.org website evolves.

Peter Burgess

Sustainability ... important, but far from the mainstream of business

If it was not so serious you would have to laugh!

The organizer of a corporate responsibility conference sent me a message announcing the good news that the CEO of a big success story among successful sustainability companies would be a speaker. The success was based on the DOW-Jones SAM sustainability indexes.

I did not know much about the Dow-Jones SAM sustainability indexes so I did a bit of research. Well it is good that someone is trying to measure these things ... I suppose.

And then I looked at the company that was this big success ... and again good that they have the word sustainability in their vocabulary. But I had to laugh when I found the reference to sustainability in their stockholder report. I quote (from their website):

Sustainability Performance
Chairman's Statement on the Report 2009
Our sustainability agenda gathered momentum during 2009. I took great pride in the fact that AkzoNobel was again listed among the world leaders in the Chemicals sector on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, with a second place rating. Our clear objective is to remain in the top three. Safety – just one part of our broader sustainability agenda – also remained paramount and continuous step-by-step improvements have been made in our performance. In fact, the total reportable rate of injuries for our employees and contractors improved by around 20 percent during 2009, while we are still striving to achieve our ambitious 2010 target of two or less injuries per one million hours worked. I feel confident that we will get there.

Despite the challenges we faced during 2009, there can be no doubt that it was a year in which we demonstrated the fundamental strength of our company. We have the utmost confidence in that strength, and in the ability of our management to successfully guide AkzoNobel into the future. We will therefore propose a dividend at the upper end of the dividend policy range to our shareholders at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting.

Visit the 2009 Report website for full details about our sustainability performance.

My first read had me thinking that safety was the highlight of their sustainability, but then I realized that safety was a freestanding idea ... which is OK. But in the section of the website about sustainability most of the talk is still about how much return the stockholders are going to get from what the company does.

This is a chemical company. They make all sorts of products that are bought to improve quality of life. They employ people and pay good wages (I believe). They use raw materials that may or may not be part of sustainable society, and the by-products and waste may or may not be damaging to the environment. I know nothing about this company and society ... and they are not telling me much.

It's a joke ... I want to laugh ... but instead I am mad as hell!

Peter Burgess

Informal settlements ... migration into urban areas

Dear Colleagues

I got an e-mail from an organization in India about a problem in Mumbai ... a problem that exists in communities all around the world. Here is the message. My reply follows.

Do suggest solutions to tackle pavement takeovers in Mumbai

info@karmayog.org to me
Posted by Namita in www.karmayog.org - a platform for social and civic issues

100 yards from the Anti Corruption Bureau office on P B Marg, right in front of the sprawling Kamala Mills Compound, diagonally opposite the Hard Rock Cafe, a large group of migrant labourers have taken up residence... with plastic sheets, tiles uprooted from the pavement, railings and bamboos pilfered from a nearby worksite, and bits and pieces salvaged from trash heaps. They have even built a makeshift temple very recently out of these scraps where elaborate puja is conducted by the women.

The pavement is completely blocked. So they have spilled out on the road. They have set up cooking fires on the road itself and defecate and bathe openly on the road itself. They also use the road itself to make their wares ... garlands and baskets and trinkets and food items which they sell. The children, specially the very young, crawl directly on the road.

This road has become a very busy thoroughfare recently, due to all the offices in the neighbourhood. But half the road is taken up by the squatters. Pedestrians inch their way down the middle of the road, trying to dodge buses and cars. Young girls working at the BPOs in adjacent offices, run the gamut of walking through crowds of young men lolling around in their underwear, squatting on the road.

At times, violent fights break out between the inmates, spilling out into the opposite lane. At peak hours, huge traffic jams start as the traffic moves forward in a single lane, barely inches away from the cooking fires burning away on the road. And at night, buses and trucks roaring down the ill lit road are in grave danger of running down the barely seen huddles of people sleeping directly on the road.

Apart from being filthy, insanitary, a breeding ground for disease, apart from being a traffic hazard and a safety hazard, apart from being a complete trangression of all BMC and RTO rules, it is unthinkable that human beings are being given permission to live like this on such a busy thoroughfare - and they must be given permission by SOMEONE, because they can't just live like that in open sight, breaking all the rules without someone in authority turning a blind eye.

So who is this someone we need to speak to? Who is there in BMC who can help? Or the POLICE? The local police have obviously been looking the other way and it obviously is worth their inattention. So nothing to be gained by complaining.

Any ideas?

Posted by Namita in www.karmayog.org - a platform for social and civic issues

Do reply via http://www.karmayog.org/messages/message.aspx?id=4001
Do inform if you do not wish to receive such emails from us.

This is my reply .. addressing a bit of the issue, but not all of it by a long way.

Dear Colleagues

This is a great question. Most easy "solutions" are not solutions at all and merely move, hide or destroy the problem. A "top down" view and top down solutions tend not to be very effective.

Why are these migrant labourers settled in this location? Perhaps they see it as the "best" place to be. Why? Is it the potential for work? Is it a better place to be than the alternatives?

In Harlem, New York, some years ago street vendors pretty much took over a big part of Central Harlem. Eventually a local group in cooperation with the city authorities set up a more formal market area where vendors could operate. There was a lot of noise because the location was not as well trafficked and it was a change ... but several years later the new location is itself now part of the Harlem scene and on tour bus routes! The new location was "better" because (1) it solved the problem of informal street vending on the main streets AND (2) it allowed the vendors to maintain a livelihood. It was not an easy thing to implement but it worked better than some people expected.

Your situation is not the same ... but there has to be (1) a better place for migrant workers to live than where they are and (2) there has to be more potential for livelihood than where they are. These are both tough questions for society to address. Rural area to urban area migration has become a huge issue around the world and is not addressed in the normal metrics used by decision makers responsible for financial fund allocation. Money moves to increase profits but rarely moves to improve quality of life, especially the quality of life of people at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). The capital markets do not give any credit to people and organizations that improve quality of life unless they make profit doing it. This is an unsustainable idea.

Again, using New York as an example. Several years ago there was a quality of life problem caused by drug dealing in open spaces around the city and homeless people occupying these places. There has been (1) a massive improvement in the performance of the police in addressing unlawful behavior ... but in a constructive way, and (2) an improvement in the social service intervention to help the homeless and address drug addiction. This has been expensive in terms of both police costs and social service cost but for every resident it has improved quality of life substantially. The value proposition for society has been positive. There has also been a "good economy" for much of this time which helped to diminish one of the root causes.

The challenge of poverty is complex. Better health services and better education help, but it is better opportunity to earn a decent wage that is the big item. Again, the profit market metrics are very good to put some people to work, but leave out a big segment of society. I want to see value metrics in play as well so that NEEDS can be matched with underutilized human capacity to satisfy needs. This model cannot easily be profitable, but this model is value adding for society in an amazing way.

This is already too long ... so let me stop now. This is an important subject.

Peter Burgess
truevaluemetrics.org

Testing a link to a page within TrueValueMetrics.Org

Dear Colleagues

I have been struck by the power and the complexity of the modern social media networked world in part because of the dynamic of the protest movements in North Africa and the Arab World ... and indeed perhaps also in the old industrialized world ... places like London, UK and Madison, Wisconsin, USA!

In the next few weeks I will be doing all I can to take advantage of the linking tools that are available to join websites, to blogs, to Facebook, to Twitter and hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar emerging platforms. The following was automatically generated from a "button" on one of the pages of the TrueValueMetrics.org website. This particular page is about "organizations" and it does enable a user to get to a specific page ... which is good. TrueValueMetrics.Org

Maintaining control over user access and security is important ... and fortunately the basic architecture of the website code probably will make it relatively easy to have that fairly strong and fairly easy to use at the same time.

What is particularly confusing is that many different developers have created similar tools, and they all work in pretty much the same way ... but the statistics associated with all these different approaches is unlikely to make much sense.

I have concluded that ignoring social media platforms is no longer an option ... and in due course I hope you will be seeing a very coordinated TrueValueMetrics presence on all the main platforms that are being used globally.

One step at a time. This is just a test. In due course the buttons on the truevaluemetrics.org website will be working, and content will be flowing between all the platforms. We are trying to simplify data to make it meaningful, but the technology to do it seems to get more and more complex all the time!

Stay tuneds

Peter Burgess



//////

Dialog about malaria control from JustMeans

Dear Colleagues

I have just written the following about the cost of malaria interventions.

The issue of malaria concerns me a lot. Efforts to reduce the impact of malaria has gained funding over the past few years impressively and now exceeds $2 billion a year. It is interesting and really quite disgusting that one high profile film star gets more attention than millions and millions of ordinary people!

My main issue is that the use of this malaria control money may have been an awful waste. There is hardly any verifiable data about the cost effectiveness of what is being done. I have been in contact with the US President's Malaria Initiative in Washington and they publish a lot about what they plan to do with the money, but rather little about what they actually have achieved with the money beyond very vague unverifiable generalities. This is, of course, a standard government approach to accountability ... but it is also a process that allows a lot of money to get disbursed without very much of value being obtained from the fund flows.

Organizations like Malaria No More have helped raise the profile of malaria as an international health issue, but they have also been a dangerous part of promoting single approach solutions that are not universally appropriate. It would most likely have been much more effective to start with control of transmission through better control of the mosquito rather than merely putting people under bednets and using Artimesan based drugs. Malaria has an important spatial dimension that is ignored in most of the initiatives that are currently getting big funding. What a waste!

I wrote this in response to this posting written by Tove Rasmussen. The URL is:
http://www.justmeans.com/Ancient-Malaria-Killer-Gains-Spotlight/43710.html This is the text:

Ancient Malaria Killer Gains Spotlight
Posted On: February 04

George Clooney's recent contraction of malaria together with the publicity talents of Malaria No More (MNM) have put the disease in the spotlight. It causes 1 to 3 million deaths per year, with ninety percent in Africa. Of these, most are young children. With some relatively simple solutions and development of a vaccine, the ancient disease can be eliminated.

George Clooney contracted Malaria following a trip to Sudan unfortunately.

This has raised the profile of the disease, prompting many to ask what Malaria is. The disease is spread by the bite of infected Anopheles mosquitoes. Its symptoms include headache, fever, and other flu-like symptoms. Untreated, it leads to comas, serious anemia and death.

MNM has played a key role in putting the focus on malaria, and wants to eradicate the health issue by 2015.

MNM co-founder Ray Chambers approached President and Mrs. Bush to host a first-of-its-kind world event on the single disease. As a result, in 2006 the White House Summit on Malaria brought together global government, health, NGO and faith leaders - and gave the health issue much-needed global attention.

The Economist treated the event as a new product launch: "This Thursday George and Laura Bush are due to host a most unusual product launch …. the eradication of malaria. The brains behind the summit, a group of business leaders and philanthropists operating under the auspices of a non-governmental organization called Malaria No More, are convinced that the time is right to launch what they hope will be the next big thing in the giving business." ("The Branding of Malaria," The Economist, December 12, 2006.)

As malaria has gained prominence so has funding to develop a vaccine, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation $10 billion to develop vaccines for the world's poorest countries over the next ten years. Though malaria is one of the oldest diseases, a vaccine has still yet to be developed. Other available tools to eliminate the disease are basic: long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets (LLINs), education, insecticides, and early diagnosis and treatment.

MNM is also working to ensure each family in Africa has access to the malaria prevention toolkit. In early 2010, MNM provided close to 90,000 mosquito nets to Senegal.

One Tweet by Ashton Kutcher on World Malaria Day 2009 became the most re-tweeted message, resulting in the 90,000 nets for Senegal. With social media changing the face of funding, getting more bed nets is no longer the issue.

The bigger challenge now is distributing tens of thousands of bed nets over a few weeks, rather than thousands in one year. To solve this logistical challenge, MNM has teamed up with the Alliance for Malaria Prevention (AMP), made up of over 40 international organizations who train health workers on how to effectively distribute the bed nets effectively.

In Senegal, a number of organizations including the U.S. Peace Corps, World Vision, the National Malaria Control Program (PNLP), Sumitomo Chemical and local heath workers provided the nets to families, ensuring they were trained in their use. Following the project, nearly 100,000 nets hung in the communities of 265,000 people.

Photo Credit: dullhunk

Subsequently there was another comments as follows. The writer, Ano Lobb, comes at malaria control from a medical perspective:

Further compounding the struggle against malaria is its frightening, and fascinating, ability to evade control by vaccination, being cloaked in a constantly mutating jacket of protective protein: http://jm.ly/5wI9PQ

Innovation in how to develop more effective vaccines will hopefully foil the parasite's wiley guise and add inoculation to the anti-malarial arsenal: http://jm.ly/coh58C

And then my follow up comment:

The matter of vaccination against malaria is extremely complicated ... and I do not pretend to know the scientific details. From a resource management perspective however I would observe that there has been great success in controlling vector borne diseases like malaria by effective control of the vector ... the mosquito.

The origins of the US Center for Disease Control goes back to malaria in the USA ... and explains why the CDC is based in Atlanta and not DC. The history of SUCCESS with malaria control is all about effective investment in vector control ... and for that the best starting point is very good spatial understanding of the mosquito and its habitat, and humans and where they live and go about their business.

Pretty much all the money is being disbursed to research vaccines, distribute bednets and subsidize Artimesan based drugs with virtually nothing going into systems for sustainable vector control.

I am pretty unhappy about this situation, and especially the role of the high profile business and entertainment elite in making decisions that are high cost and not very effective. I am appalled at how little performance information is actually available ... probably in great part because the performance is low relative to what has been said in the PR.

Malaria is a disease that mostly kills poor people ... and the sophisticated solutions to address the problem that are being pursued with available funding are totally uneconomic and unsustainable for poor societies. Much of what needs to be done to improve vector control can be done with local interventions ... but is not really on the agenda at WHO, the NIH, the Gates Foundation, medical researchers and all the rest. Old fashioned low tech may well be the best way to go!

Peter Burgess
truevaluemetrics.org

I have done considerable research around the cost effectiveness of health interventions in developing countries, and it comes as no surprise that there are quite modest results from very substantial resources. The understanding of costs and efficiency is almost totally absent in the community of technical experts that are engaged with the problem, and it is therefore no surprise that the costs are out of control. This problem is aggravated by all sorts of "leakages' of resources out of the system as a result of corruption.

At some point the people in charge of all of this have got to get serious ... hold people accountable for performance ... or be held accountable themselves!

Peter Burgess