“On the Ground with Dani Nierenberg” is an ongoing series documenting Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg’s ground-truthing work. Read more by clicking here.
I feel lucky that I had the chance to spend time with scientists researching malaria during my recent trip to Kenya.
At icipe’s Mbita campus on the shores of Lake Victoria, Dr. Syeda Tullu Bukhari and her colleagues are working closely with communities to better understand how malaria is spreading and how to stop it. The region’s islands are home to fishing communities that depend on the lake for their livelihoods. It is also one of the areas hardest hit by malaria in Kenya.
And according to Tullu, the situation is getting worse.
“Malaria is not just a health problem,” she told me. “It is a development problem.”
When large numbers of children miss school because of malaria or farmers are too sick to work during planting and harvest season, the impacts ripple through entire communities. Some infections can sideline people for months and require multiple rounds of treatment before recovery.
“The economic cost to households is enormous,” Tullu says. “And it compounds over time.”
The connection between malaria and food insecurity is direct. If a farmer cannot work during a critical growing season, families can lose both income and food for the year. And when this happens across thousands of households, it becomes a barrier to education, livelihoods, and long-term economic growth and resilience.
The climate crisis is only making these challenges worse.
Tullu has spent nearly two decades studying malaria in western Kenya and says rainfall patterns have shifted dramatically. Traditionally, there were distinct long and short rainy seasons separated by a dry period. Now, those seasons are blending.
“In 2025, there was really no gap between the long rains and short rains,” she explains. “There were almost eight months of rain.”
Standing water creates ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes. A longer rainy season means a longer malaria season. Even more concerning, malaria is spreading into parts of northern Kenya that historically experienced only seasonal outbreaks.
“Different mosquito species survive under different environmental conditions,” Tullu explains. “As the climate changes, the species composition shifts too.”
Understanding those shifts requires an enormous amount of fieldwork and surveillance.
Before visiting icipe, I naïvely imagined mosquito trapping was fairly straightforward. It’s not.
Tullu’s team uses CDC light traps equipped with small fans to collect adult mosquitoes, aspirators to gather insects from indoor and outdoor resting areas, solar-powered traps in remote locations, and dippers to collect mosquito larvae from standing water. Those dippers are like long soup ladles that community health workers use to collect larvae from puddles, drainage areas, and other places where standing water collects. The mosquitoes are then brought back to the laboratory where scientists use PCR testing to identify species and determine whether they are carrying Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria.
The work is painstaking, technical, and expensive. And according to Tullu, funding cuts are already weakening surveillance systems across Kenya.
“When national surveillance systems are underfunded, researchers are forced to collect baseline data themselves,” she says. “We end up trying to answer scientific questions without reliable national data.”
At the same time, icipe scientists are also studying mosquito genetics to better understand why some mosquito populations are more likely to carry malaria or develop resistance to control measures.
This research could have important implications for communities in Mbita and far beyond.
If a mosquito population develops resistance to an insecticide, that tool can become useless within a few years,” Tullu explains. “Genetic surveillance helps us anticipate this and adapt before resistance becomes widespread.”
Scientists are also studying microsporidia, naturally occurring microbes found in some mosquitoes that appear to significantly reduce malaria transmission. icipe researchers are collecting mosquito samples from across Africa to better understand how these microbes function and whether they could eventually become part of future malaria control strategies.
“On the surface, the mosquitoes all look the same,” Tullu says. “But genetically, they may not be.”
The implications extend far beyond Kenya. As mosquito populations shift into new geographies due to climate change, genetic surveillance could help scientists predict outbreaks before they happen.
But Tullu emphasizes that science alone is not enough.
One of the things that most impressed me during my visit was how deeply icipe works with communities. After a somewhat harrowing, but exhilarating hour-long speedboat ride on Lake Victoria, we landed on the island of Mgingo and met with community health workers. These volunteers help researchers build trust, reach vulnerable households, and adapt interventions to fit people’s day-to-day lives.
“Solutions have to be co-created,” Tullu says. “You cannot hand them down.”
Tullu says one of the biggest barriers to malaria prevention is not just funding, but awareness. Simple interventions like screened windows, improved housing, repellents, and bed nets can significantly reduce transmission, but many communities lack access to information, supplies, or long-term support.
And even successful interventions come with unexpected complications. Among fishing communities around Lake Victoria, Tullu says the misuse of bed nets is “quite prevalent.” But contrary to popular belief, community members are not using them for fishing nets. Instead, households often repurpose the nets to protect vegetable gardens from pests.
While talking with Tullu both in Kenya and later on Zoom, she also expressed frustration with the abrupt disappearance of the U.S. Agency for International Development-funded programs in the region.
“So much money was spent without sustainability plans,” she told me. “As a scientist, I have to include long-term sustainability in every grant I write.”
Tullu herself brings both authority and humility to this work. Originally from Pakistan, she says she always excelled in science growing up. Culturally, daughters were expected to become doctors, she joked, but she did not score highly enough on her exams for medical school and instead studied zoology and entomology. Thankfully for the future of malaria research, she did.
Spending time with scientists like Tullu and her colleagues left me with a sense of hope. Hope that we can learn the importance of interconnectedness—poverty, poor public health, lack of food and nutrition security, and the climate crisis are all inextricably linked. And the solutions will need to be linked as well.
Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.
