You may have read about ‘ivermectin’ in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. But when I hear the name of this drug, I always think of one of the world’s biggest public health successes – and it may not be a story you have heard before, because it mostly happened in remote communities in Africa.

Agnes, a pretty young girl living in a rural area of eastern Nigeria, was pregnant, anemic, weak and suffering from terrible skin lesions that she scratched constantly, when she met researcher Uche Amazigo at a clinic in a small Nigerian village in 1991. Their meeting not only changed Agnes’ life – it also eventually changed the lives of millions of people in Africa, through a community-run treatment program that works even in the most challenging and difficult conditions.