Mwele Ntuli Malecela

Mwele Ntuli Malecela (26 March 1963 – 10 February 2022) was a Tanzanian civil servant who was a senior United Nations official and the director of the Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases at the World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Quotes As scientists, a fundamental principle of our work is based on recognising and removing bias from our studies. And just as I believe in the scientific process, I believe in recognising and removing bias from our social and institutional processes. The importance of unlocking the potential of our female colleagues around the globe so they do not have to fight quite so hard to reach their potential cannot be emphasised enough, and I believe that the responsibility for doing that belongs to all of us.” To be honest, in Tanzania I don’t think they are really neglected. There was a time when there was little knowledge of the diseases in terms of their distribution–specifically five of them which have been discussed at length at this NTD summit. Looking at those diseases in Tanzania, the picture was not clear before the mid-90s. Data was not well-organized and there were no program based-approaches in dealing with the NTDs. The data was sporadic—showing incidences here and there. For instance, there was only data showing that Lymphatic Filariaisis was in the Kilombero River Valley, then in certain areas such as the Coast of Tanzania, but there were no concerted efforts to map the whole country to find out the real burden of NTDs. And, for Lympahtic Filariasis which I have worked on for a long time, there was a time we had to go out in the night—between 10pm and 2a.m to collect blood samples because that’s the time when the parasites are in the circulation, but when diagnostics became available, it became easier to trace the parasites at any time of the day, also the mapping exercise became easier. I am now a Tanzanian who is serving the African continent. It’s a precious opportunity that has been accorded to me to serve the continent. This was a dream of our founding leaders such as Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkurumah of Ghana. In the spirit of Pan-Africanism, I am really glad to be in this position. I really desired to continue serving back home in my country but this opportunity I got at WHO-Afro gives me another chance to serve at the continent level. In an interview Ten years ago, that was around 2007. We were at the point of integrating the NTDs at that time, so,I don’t think there is anything I could have done differently. Five year ago, there was in fact a better story to tell of the efforts invested—work had picked up already. But, if you would ask me 20 years ago, there were many things I could have done differently. By the year 2009, many things had been done; Tanzania had been well represented at the London Declaration of NTDs. And, we had already made tremendous steps in terms of scaling up the programs and now we have reached this stage—like we have heard during this summit—where countries are making commitments to eliminate the NTDs in many countries including Tanzania. In an interview I think Tanzania is performing well. There is no problem at all. You see, the issue is about properly using the data that has been obtained in making policy decisions. That’s where the problem lies—and this is for many African countries. But I have no doubt about the ability of our scientists in collecting data and doing all the mapping. In an interview I think the biggest problem with the media in Tanzania, is that there is an obvious lack of skills among the journalists on how to report what we researchers do. And, unfortunately when they can’t do it perfectly, we [the researchers] tend to unfairly blame them—and then we sit back and say, we don’t want to speak to them anymore. Right now[in Tanzania], there is almost like a “freeze”—of not many people not wanting to speak to the media because of the feeling that what they speak might be misconstrued and at times taken out of context. I think, at this point, as a country we need to build the skills of our journalists to be able to report certain fields through specialization. Let’s make journalists that report on science, technology, medicine and so on. Without this kind of specialization, we are always going to have problems with the media. Initially, we thought it was okay, as long as the journalists transfer the message, no problem but once there a problem, the information they send can even ruin careers. This will always create conflicts between researchers and the media. I have nothing against journalists, but what I want to say is that we need to do something. Without investment into how journalists work with researchers, it’s going to be difficult for researchers to work with the media. The researchers will continue shying away from the media because we [researchers] have the obligations to be sure that what we say is accurate, clear and user-friendly. I know that researcher also have the trouble of communicating “clearly” what they do. We need to sort out all those, otherwise, we will always end up in trouble with the media. External links Category:Civil servants Category:Physicians from Tanzania Category:Women politicians in Tanzania Category:United Nations officials Category:1963 births Category:2022 deaths Category:Women born in the 1960s