To create video and photographic coverage for TV presenter Charlie Webster’s trip for the Malaria Must Die campaign, our Cloud9Media team spent a busy action-packed week in Western Uganda. In the process, Charlie saw with her own eyes how malaria impacts local communities, and came to terms with a fatal disease that she caught herself when cycling to the Rio Olympics in 2016 on a charity fundraising drive.

At the forefront of the fight against malaria, organisations like Malaria No More have always taken a bold controversial approach to their messaging to help it resonate with Western audiences. The aim of their campaigns is to bring home the reality that malaria is not something that happens elsewhere, but is affecting people everywhere. Increasingly, thanks to climate change, this includes areas of the world where malaria was once unheard of.

Using archival shots taken from Charlie’s broadcast career and stills of her hospitalisation, our team combined these with our own footage to show the background of Charlie’s journey. The result is a short film that captured the challenges she and other sufferers of malaria face, and how there is hope for the elimination of malaria.

Humanity has eradicated one dangerous disease: smallpox. Under the right circumstances, we are on the path to achieve elimination or eradication of four others.

We were commissioned to create a series of films aimed at increasing awareness and accelerating progress towards disease elimination, particularly around neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as polio, lymphatic filariasis, river blindness & malaria.

By focusing on the key lessons from the successful smallpox and ongoing polio eradication campaigns, and hearing from the people at a global and national level, our films in GLIDE’s ‘Eliminating Diseases’ video series sought to  raise the profile of NTDs amongst stakeholders, funders and governmental organisations.

We’re proud to share that our film generated over 1,000 views on GLIDE’s YouTube channel, and over 150,000 combined video plays on their social media channels. In addition, page visits to the organisation’s website rose by 161%, along with a 187% increase in new users, with the most notable increase seen in visitors from target country, Cameroon, which saw a 100% rise.

As a crowning achievement, we along with Gong Communications were nominated as finalists in the 2023 Sabre Awards in the Central African category for work in raising awareness through GLIDE’s Webisodes Campaign.

This film follows the work of the Malaria Elimination in South East Asia (MESA) project in Myanmar and Cambodia as it uses the power of community to combat Malaria. 

Individuals within communities who have not contracted malaria over long periods of time are identified and then trained to share their good preventative habits with the rest of their community. Using this approach, known as positive deviance, encourages greater acceptance and stronger ownership of best practice among the communities in which it has been introduced.

Following a fascinating ten days in South East Asia, director and cameraman Steve Maud gained an amazing insight in to the plight of migrant workers in this area and this powerful new preventative approach based on community volunteers and role models.