Schistosomiasis Control Initiative

A program to control the parasitic disease schistosomiasis in sub-Saharan Africa, founded in 2002 by parasitologist Alan Fenwick with a 20 million pound grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, beginning as a research group within Imperial College London under Fenwick and co-director Joanne Webster. The founding proposal, developed at Harvard by Fenwick and Michael Reich with students Scott Gordon and Bea Bezmalinovic and defended in Geneva with support from the World Health Organization's Lorenzo Savioli and Dirk Engels, grew from a 2000 Gates Foundation-backed effort to test whether African governments would treat infected populations at scale if given the resources, and whether that treatment would measurably reduce infection. The Initiative's founding objective was to prove that a national schistosomiasis control program could be built and delivered at scale in a way other countries could replicate, and by 2008 it had helped establish national control programs in six countries, three in Anglophone East Africa and three in Francophone West Africa, before becoming an independent organization in 2019 under the name Unlimit Health.