When we spoke last year you were very positive about the battle against malaria, citing increased funding, the availability of good tools to fight the disease and greater political will. Are you still as positive now as you were then?
I think there’s even more cause for being positive but there’s also some cautionary flags. The positive is that the investment is working. Global investment in malaria control is paying off, and the funding which has cascaded dramatically over the last 10 years has resulted in saving lives and improvement in prevention and treatment.
We, as in the global malaria partners – governments, public sector, private sector, NGOs etcetera – have a plan in place and it is increasingly receiving good country-level attention, especially in Africa, and more political will and more local resources are going toward implementing the plan.
The funding commitments have gone up considerably, somewhere from U.S. $50 million a year for malaria a decade ago
from the entire international community to now something like U.S. $2 billion committed from all international institutions in 2011.
You can imagine with the economic headwinds, with the global downturn and also with a lot of competing priorities that donor governments have, the real question is will this level of finance be sustained? And if it’s not sustained what’s going to happen to the progress?
Source: Allafrica
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