British footballer David Beckham has featured in a new short film aimed at spreading awareness about malaria. The video comes as part of a campaign titled “Malaria Must Die, So Millions Can Live”.
In the video, Beckham puts forward his appeal in nine different languages, including Hindi. The languages chosen for the video seem to be a mix of those with global appeal and those that belong to the worst-affected regions.
English, Mandarin, Arabic, French, and Spanish are spoken widely across the globe. On the other hand, languages like Hindi (native to the Indian subcontinent), Kinyarwanda (spoken in Rwanda and parts of Uganda), Kiswahili (spoken widely across eastern and south-eastern Africa), and Yoruba (spoken in western Africa) belong to countries that have recorded most of the malaria cases in the past.
Nigeria, where Yoruba is a widely-spoken language, accounted for 25% of total malaria cases in the world in 2017, according to the World Health Organization estimates. Around 4% of the world’s total malaria cases in 2017 were reported from India.
In the video, Beckham urges people to speak up in order to “make the world leaders pay attention”. He also calls for “more action” to defeat the “the deadliest disease there’s ever been”. The video uses artificial intelligence to make Beckham speak in the voices of men and women from across the globe, including malaria survivors and doctors fighting the disease.
“Malaria Must Die, So Millions Can Live” is a voice petition that, instead of collecting signatures, encourages people to go to its website and record the message “malaria must die”.
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