Rotary Club Uses Shuttlecocks To Fight Poverty — And Polio
The Rotary Club of Rahman Putra ran a three-day badminton tournament series in September to scout underprivileged talent and raise funds to eradicate a disease most people think no longer exists.
On the surface, it looked like a badminton tournament.
It was also a poverty intervention, a fundraiser, and a reminder that polio is not, in fact, gone.
The Rotary Club of Rahman Putra organised a three-event series across 19 and 20 September, built around its Life Transformation Programme — a long-running initiative that uses badminton as a ladder out of poverty for underprivileged children.
The club’s annual junior championship returned this year after a two-year hiatus. The tournament is open to all — national players, state players, and raw trainees alike.
That last category is the point.
Charter President Chua Keng Soon told TRP that the tournament is a talent identification exercise.
Children from poor families who show promise are assessed, and the club steps in with sponsorship to support their development.
The founder of the Life Transformation Programme (LTP) said the club has committed to holding the championship every year.
A Fellowship Tournament With A Cause Attached
Also held on September 19 was a separate social tournament — no national players, no rankings pressure, just community.
The event doubled as a platform to promote District 3300‘s End Polio campaign.
Chua noted that polio eradication, not badminton rankings, was the secondary headline of the weekend.
The headline event came on 20 September: a VIP Invitational Challenge, where each pair consisted of one elite or national-level player partnered with a corporate or public figure.
Eight pairs competed, and a world champion badminton player was among those present.
Corporate figures and medical professionals were also among the attendees, joined by former national shuttlers Ong Ewe Hock and Vivian Hoo, alongside a representative from Taiwanese racket brand MMOA.
Ong, a two-time Malaysia Open champion, two-time Olympian, and Thomas Cup stalwart, remains one of the more recognisable names from Malaysia’s men’s singles circuit of the 2000s–2010s.
Hoo, elder sister of mixed doubles player Hoo Pang Ron, is a two-time Commonwealth Games champion in women’s doubles who retired from professional badminton in January 2025.
The event was a fundraiser for the End Polio campaign.
Beacon Hospital, a private specialist hospital located in Petaling Jaya, is a key sponsor, supporting both the badminton programme and a separate concert held in April.
The Disease Most People Think Is Gone
The club’s End Polio push sits within the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) — a coalition backed by the World Health Organisation, the US Centers for Disease Control, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The mechanism: Rotary International commits to raising USD 50 million (RM204 million).
The Gates Foundation matches it at USD 100 million (RM408 million).
Targeted eradication year is now 2029, pushed back from earlier projections due to disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Active transmission remains in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of India — regions where vaccination access is limited.
Malaysia recorded an imported case in 2019; a three-month-old Malaysian infant in Tuaran, Sabah, was confirmed to have contracted circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 1 (cVDPV1).
Chua said the assumption that polio has been eliminated is the problem.
Vaccination coverage, he noted, is what keeps it that way.
