Malaria

Since 2007, CHAI has provided direct management and technical support to governments around the globe to assist them in scaling up effective interventions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance. This work includes devising context-adapted, resource optimized plans; supporting efficient execution of targeted interventions; and accelerating progress towards malaria elimination. CHAI believes malaria elimination is possible with currently available tools throughout much of the world today, but it will require substantial investment in improving systems to identify where where transmission is occurring, how parasites are moving, and what packages of interventions are most cost-efficient and sustainable for specific contexts.

While working toward eventual elimination in all contexts, CHAI assists some of the countries with the highest malaria burdens in the world to procure and distribute affordable, effective drugs and improve the efficiency with which they implement preventative interventions. CHAI supports countries with moderate or evolving malaria burdens to scale up access to diagnostic testing to ensure limited resources are used effectively, and to target interventions to where they are truly needed. In lower burden countries in Central America, Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia, CHAI works to strengthen surveillance activities and devise new strategies for ending malaria transmission permanently.

CHAI is currently providing operational and management support to improve the effectiveness of malaria programs in Botswana, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Kenya, Laos, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nigeria, Panama, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.

CHAI-supported successes have included:

• 13.7 million vials of injectable artesunate, the World Health Organization-recommended first-line treatment for severe malaria, were ordered for CHAI focal countries in 2015, allowing over 2.1 million severe malaria patients to be treated with the best available medicine and averting 52,000 deaths compared to previously used treatments
• Extended price agreements with manufacturers and importers, and continued implementation of demand generation campaigns, leading to sales of 1.1 million rapid diagnostic tests in 2015
• Piloting methods for increasing the availability of diagnostic testing in Tanzania including training of 830 healthcare providers from 521 private health facilities in eight regions, which has the potential to reduce unnecessary ACT use by millions of treatments
• Supporting the government of Swaziland to reach an all-time low malaria incidence of 72 locally acquired cases in 2015-2016, down from over 7,000 in 2008
• Assisting Namibia to dramatically improve testing and reporting of malaria and reduce malaria to under 12,000 malaria cases in 2015, down from a reported 560,000 in 2004
• Preventing approximately 20,000 children from becoming sick with malaria in northern Nigeria through seasonal distribution of prophylactic drugs during the 2014 malaria season