NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Although malaria is both preventable and curable, it still killed an estimated 584,000 people in 2013, the majority of them African children.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mortality rates have fallen by 47 percent globally since 2000. But in Africa, a child dies every minute from malaria.

The economic toll is also high: each year, malaria costs the African continent alone an estimated 12 billion dollars in lost productivity, and in some high-burden countries, it can account for as much as 40 percent of public health spending.

As the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) kicked off Monday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaders presented a new strategic vision for malaria elimination that calls for doubling current financing by 2020.

“The new 2030 malaria goals – and the 2020 and 2025 milestones laid out in the WHO and RBM [Roll Back Malaria Partnership] strategies – are ambitious but achievable,” said Dr. Pedro Alonso, Director of the WHO’s Global Malaria Programme.

“We must accelerate progress toward malaria elimination to ensure that neither parasite resistance to drugs, mosquito resistance to insecticides, nor malaria resurgence unravels the tremendous gains to date. We can and must achieve even greater impact to protect the investment the global community has made.”