Global SMC community celebrates new milestone at SMC Alliance Annual Meeting in Nigeria

The fifth Annual Meeting of the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) Alliance brought together implementing countries, partners and donors to review the past year’s activities and plan for future SMC campaigns across Africa.

Caregiver with child who received SPAQ as part of SMC campaign in FCT state, Nigeria, September 2023

Malaria Consortium participated in the 5th Annual Meeting of the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) Alliance hosted by Nigeria’s National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP) in Abuja this week. The meeting served as a forum for key SMC stakeholders including implementing countries, partners and donors, to come together to review the past year’s activities and plan for the future.

A key highlight from the meeting included confirmation that the global reach of SMC moved to over 50 million children in one year for the first time since SMC was recommended by the World Health Organization in 2012. Preliminary figures shared at the meeting confirmed that 53 million children were reached in 2023 across 18 countries in over 900 districts.

The specific objectives of the meeting were to review coverage results from the 2023 campaign; share best practices, challenges and lesson learnt; share updates on ongoing SMC research projects; review forecasts for the 2024 and 2025 SMC campaigns; and communicate plans and technical assistance required for the 2024 SMC campaign.

Other notable themes covered by the meeting included the ambition to further the digitalisation of SMC across Africa, the prospect of integrating SMC campaigns with other health services, and the challenges and opportunities of implementing SMC in geographies where other chemoprevention interventions are in use or may be used in the future, including perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC) and intermittent preventive treatment in schools (IPTsc).

Dr Nnenna Ogbulafor, Head of Case Management at Nigeria’s NMEP, said: “Nigeria reached 28.5 million children with SMC in 2023 and so Nigeria hosting this year’s SMC Alliance Annual Meeting was not just an opportunity for us to showcase our hospitality. It was also a testament to our commitment to seasonal malaria chemoprevention as an intervention and our ambition to foster good partnerships with the wider SMC community.”

Dr Kolawole Maxwell, Malaria Consortium’s West and Central Africa Programmes Director, said: “The impressive milestone of reaching over 50 million children with SMC in 2023 signifies not only progress but also the collective dedication of stakeholders worldwide. This was underlined by an informative and engaging SMC Alliance meeting. As we move forward, it's imperative to harness digitalisation, explore integration with other health services and encourage the scale-up of other malaria interventions. National malaria programmes and implementers can learn from the experiences of scaling up SMC to support wider efforts towards achieving universal health coverage. Together, we can continue to make strides in combating malaria.”

You can learn more about the SMC Alliance at smc-alliance.org