Malaria is the world’s most devastating parasitic disease. Every year it affects half a billion people across the globe, causing over a million deaths in Africa alone. Children, pregnant women, and people living with HIV/AIDS are at highest risk, because of weak or immature immune systems.
Malaria is particularly calamitous in poor rural and urban areas. It thrives where there is limited access to treatment, care, and health education, sidelining breadwinners and jeopardising lives. Families in sub-Saharan Africa may lose up to 80% of their household income to missed work days, medication, and other malaria-related costs.
In Tanzania, one of the countries where AMREF works, for example, malaria is a leading cause of death, killing 125,000 people every year. Many more face destitution because of it. As a result, malaria has become a major obstacle to Tanzania’s development. It is responsible for an estimated annual loss of 3.5% of the country’s GDP.
Yet malaria is curable and preventable. With the right interventions, treatment and prevention can be highly effective, yielding significant economic benefits, reducing poverty, and improving the overall health of a community. Less malaria means more people at work, more children at school, and better health for Africa.
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What AMREF Is Doing
Drawing on the knowledge and expertise of our staff, many of whom come from the communities where they work, AMREF provides localised, innovative, and effective malaria interventions across East Africa.
- We reach communities with culturally relevant messages about how malaria is transmitted, its symptoms, and how it can be treated and prevented. In Mtwara, Tanzania, for example, we work with traditional healers and drama groups to educate adults and children alike.
- We train community drug distributors and community health workers to reach remote, marginalised communities where they live with treatment and education. In Africa, where there are as few as one doctor per 100,000 people and the average person lives 10 km from the nearest health clinic, this can mean the difference between life and death.
- We strengthen public health systems, training health officers, laboratory technicians, nurses, and midwives, and improving the reach and effectiveness of their work. This includes everything from treating and tracking malaria infections to managing drug supplies so they are always available at district and rural health clinics.
- We are piloting an innovative program to address the problem of malaria, HIV, and TB co-infection in Luwero District, Uganda. Recognising that these three diseases often coincide in people with weak or compromised immune systems, we are training health workers to test for and treat them in tandem. Patients receiving this treatment are much more likely to recover from co-infection.
- We are seeing results. Since our project in Mtwara began in 2006, malaria mortality rates among children under five have dropped by 15%. Awareness about how to prevent malaria has increased to 70% of the population, and 85% can now recognise malaria symptoms. In the remote Afar region of Ethiopia, we have provided 99% of households with insecticide-treated nets and trained 300 community health workers to provide basic diagnosis and treatment within the community.
Related: Afar Project | Luwero Project | Mtwara Project | Video | Hasena’s story
Photo: Tyler Stiem/AMREF
