Brief Description of Programmes
More young children and pregnant women are sleeping safely without the risk of being infected by malaria because of our work on programmes such as the insecticide treatment of nets in Uganda, the retreatment centres in Ghana, donating nets to pregnant women in Mozambique and in IDP camps in Sudan. Our new approaches to developing the commercial sector can lead to sustainable access to treated mosquito nets.
Our policy advice to the West Africa Network for Monitoring Antimalarial Treatment (WANMAT) has increased capacity of nine countries to collect good quality data on drug resistance to use in developing sound policies. In Uganda the difficult process of changing treatment policy to include more effective but costly drugs is facilitated by a range of supportive activities to implement this new policy.
Countries coming out of years of conflict have fallen behind in achieving adequate protection of their people from malaria. We are working to help rebuild and update programmes in southern Sudan and increase access of IDPs to malaria prevention and treatment services in north Sudan. In northern Uganda we have achieved measurable impact through malaria control activities in camps of displaced people, where we also support tuberculosis control.
We measure everything we do, so that our advice and our strategies can adapt to provide maximum effect. With so many new interventions becoming available to fight malaria, we have increased our engagement in operational research, working in collaboration with old and new partners in Europe, Africa and Asia. We were pleased to support the Cambodian National Malaria Programme to undertake a major baseline survey to allow it to rethink its strategies and monitor progress. In Mozambique we will be supporting the National Malaria Control Programme to undertake a Malaria Indicator Survey which will provide much-needed baseline information to orientate the Programme and enable impact measurement as interventions are scaled-up.
Our Irish-supported programme on health systems strengthening for malaria control in five countries has provided information and experience for ensuring that systems strengthening is at the heart of our work. Our inputs to global policies continue with support to developing the Roll Back Malaria Global Strategic Plan, the UK All Party Parliamentary Malaria Group report and a number of global working groups. Finally, we have set up programmes for malaria advocacy to bring home to politicians the huge scope for achieving impact through greater investment in malaria control.
Our work to scale up ITN coverage is approached in four different ways: retreatment of existing nets, delivery of long lasting insecticide treated nets (LLINs) to target groups through health facilities and in large community distributions, and providing support to the development of the commercial ITN market. All four approaches include a strong focus on behaviour change as an essential component to any successful scale-up in true coverage.
The profile of indoor residual spraying as a control strategy has been raised in recent years through political commitment to this intervention. One of the key discussions is over the use of the longer-acting and cheaper DDT as opposed to the pyrethroid insecticides. The Malaria Consortium is carrying out a trial of a new formulation of a pyrethroid insecticide in a peri-urban area outside Kampala that we hope will last 3-4 times longer than current formulations, making it a more realistic alternative to DDT.
Remaining challenges for increasing malaria control coverage include distribution of ITNs to vulnerable groups, raising awareness of the importance of ITNs for these target populations, increasing the use of antenatal clinics by vulnerable women, reducing drug stock-outs and increasing education among populations of pregnant women at risk of malaria.