Sarah Kline

Yesterday as World Leaders gathered in New York for the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Summit, they met to reaffirm their commitment to meeting the UN malaria goals. Malaria No More UK’s Sarah Kline was there….

I arrived in New York on Saturday night to join a team of people who I had been working with over the past few weeks to organise an event for World Leaders on malaria. The aim was to ensure that all those critical to the fight against malaria met together to both celebrate the success they have achieved so far and to declare their willingness to commit more time and resources as we look ahead to meeting the UN malaria goals.

The event was convened by the Governments of Tanzania and the UK, the African Leaders Malaria Alliance and the UN Special Envoy for Malaria, Ray Chambers. The team worked behind the scenes to confirm who would speak and critically what they would commit to deliver to help achieve the malaria MDGs.

First to go public was the UK who pre-empted the meeting to re-commit to spending £500 million per annum on malaria and to declare that UKAID would itself help 10 countries reduce deaths from malaria by at least 50% – on the way to the UN target of zero deaths from malaria. Read more about the Millennium Development Goals Summit.

Next came a series of speeches at the event itself by key players including Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda of Tanzania; President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone; President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia; Secretary of State for International Development Andrew Mitchell of Great Britain; Bill Gates, Co-chair and Trustee, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization; Robert B. Zoellick, President, the World Bank Group; Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; Admiral Tim Ziemer, US Malaria Coordinator; and Ray Chambers, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Malaria.

An outcomes document from the meeting will shortly be published (and featured on our site), summarising what was said and recording the meeting participants’ hopes for the future as we look ahead to 2015.

And what was it like for me?

Well I joined fellow UK NGOs in meeting the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell. I thanked them both for the UK government’s support and new announcement; and encouraged the UK to continue its global leadership in the fight against malaria.

I went to the NYC screening of the Yvonne Chaka Chaka film and saw friends from Roll Back Malaria and other key allies with whom we work internationally.

I also joined lots of friends and colleagues at a reception for UN MDG advocates at which the UN Secretary General declared the meeting a success and set out the historic gains he felt were made.

And just like everyone else I fought through the traffic and security cordons to try and get to meetings on time!

It was an incredible experience to see the Malaria event take place and to know that I played a small part in making it happen as part of a fantastic team. And all importantly, it was an uplifting event: to hear so many key people from Bill Gates to African Leaders including those from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Tanzania, declare we are on our way to achieving the goal to make sure everyone who needs one has access to bed nets and medicines, and to ending deaths from malaria by 2015.