Can you stop malaria crossing borders? One nation’s bid to wipe out the disease

A team member gives advice to a family in Madlangempisi in the northern Hhohho region of Eswatini, where malaria was recently discovered after four years without any cases. Photograph: Brian Otieno/The Global Fund

The freezer is filled with blue-lidded tubes of cows’ blood, ready to be defrosted and used to feed the colony of mosquitoes. “Also, you can use your arm,” says Nombuso Princess Bhembe, who tends the mosquitoes at Eswatini’s national insectary, an unremarkable building in the town of Siphofaneni, part of the southern African country’s push to eliminate malaria.

But the landlocked nation of 1.2 million people, formerly known as Swaziland, is facing headwinds from not only the climate crisis, aid cuts and insecticide resistance but also economic migration from countries with higher case numbers.