Abstract:
“The Mosquito Network” describes the appointment and work of Ray Chambers, a retired private equity entrepreneur, as the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Malaria. The A case covers the modern history of efforts to combat malaria and the beginnings of Chambers’s involvement in the cause. The B case picks up after Chambers’s appointment to the UN and describes the efforts made by Chambers and his partners and collaborators to achieve the audacious goal of eradicating deaths from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa in a decade’s time.
The Harvard Kennedy School Case Program has published two additional cases on the Mosquito Network: "The Mosquito Network: Collaborative Entrepreneurship in the Fight to Eliminate Malaria Deaths (A)," HKS Case No. 2071.0, by Gaylen Williams Moore and "The Mosquito Network: Global Governance in the Fight to Eliminate Malaria Deaths," HKS Case 2282.0, by Laura Winig.
Learning Objective:
The learning objective of the case is to examine the leadership skills and techniques required for organizing a complex network of private, non-profit, and for-profit enterprises in a combined effort to solve a global health problem. A secondary objective is to show how the “strategic triangle” used in the development of organizational strategy in the public sector can be used to imagine and test efforts to organize complex networks to solve social problems that cut across sectors as well develop strategies for particular organizations. A third learning objective is to explore the strategic policy design question of when it makes sense to pursue a relatively short-term, simple “band-aid” solution to a problem when a longer-term, potentially better and more permanent solution is on the horizon, and the development of that solution also demands effort in the present if it is to be successfully developed.
