The villagers of Bana in Burkina Faso survive by working the land. Yet recently they have been paid to sit still for six hours while a fellow villager hovers close by on the look out for mosquitoes. When one lands on their neighbour they catch it, alive and intact, before it bites and then hand it over to researchers.

This is one small stage in a painstakingly slow process of research into the local mosquito population, led by scientists at Imperial College, London.

They hope that one day Burkina Faso will be the testbed for a technology that many hope will lead to the eradication of malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that is the biggest killer of children under five in Africa.

The researchers have developed a genetically-modified mosquito in their laboratory that can kill off its own species by spreading a faulty gene.

If it works in the wild, the technology – called gene drive – could help eliminate malaria where decades of efforts involving bed nets, repellents and insecticides have failed.