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Tim Freeman’s malaria trials and the monetisation of impregnated mosquito nets in Gokwe, northwest Zimbabwe, 1993-1996
After having worked for two years at the Ministry of Health’s Blair Research Institute (now the National Institute for Health), on malaria research in the Zambezi Valley, Tim Freeman established Malair (Pvt) Ltd, a private consultancy company that operated from 1993 to 2000. Under sponsorship from EMNET (Pvt) Ltd, Freeman implemented the Gokwe Malaria Project, taking exclusive control of mosquito-net distribution in the district. In his project report, Freeman framed rural communities as largely ignorant of malaria, positioning himself as a necessary intermediary. Yet his motives were far beyond humanitarianism as he explicitly sought to turn Gokwe into a profitable market space for mosquito nets, treating them as commodities to be sold the same way pharmaceuticals sell drugs. In this talk, I will be drawing on this to speak about the blurred and often contested boundary between public health interventions and market profit. I argue that Freeman’s project exemplifies how malaria control has repeatedly been shaped by the entanglement of humanitarian rhetoric with market‑driven imperatives.
Date:
24 February 2026, 16:00
Venue:
Queen Elizabeth House, 3 Mansfield Road OX1 3TB
Venue Details:
Seminar Room 2
Speaker:
Asa Mudzimu (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Oxford Department of International Development
Organiser:
Ila Axelrod (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Oxford Southern Africa Discussion Group
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Tamsin Kelk
