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Fund your malaria fight, donors tell Uganda
Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, the Health Minister. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- According to the WHO, funding for malaria control globally is also inadequate. In 2022, US$ 4.1 billion – just over half of the needed budget – was available for malaria response.
The Health Minister, Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, has said development partners have asked Uganda and other countries with high malaria burden to take charge of the fight through increased domestic funding.
“Recently, 11 countries with high malaria burden were invited to Cameroon for a meeting and I was part of it. During that conference, reality set in, partner after partner came to speak and they said ‘The world has moved on. The world has moved on to climate change, to global health security, wars in various areas and for you, you’re still on malaria? We have moved on, so you need to look for your own domestic resources and end your malaria,” she said.
Dr Aceng narrated this to government officials and health experts on Tuesday during the 10th National Health Care Quality Improvement Conference in Entebbe. The minister said there is a need to reduce the wastage of resources and increase commitment and efficiency in service delivery to sustain the gains.
“We need to look for our own resources to end our challenges and we can only do this through innovations and quality,” she observed.
According to a statement by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on March 6, the Malaria Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, brought together Ministers of Health and senior government officials from the 11 "High burden to high impact" countries in Africa.
The countries include; Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.
The WHO said the countries were joined by “global malaria partners, funding agencies, civil society organizations and other principal stakeholders.”
“Ministers of Health from African countries with the highest burden of malaria committed today (March 6) to accelerate action to end deaths from the disease. They pledged to sustainably and equitably address the threat of malaria in the African region, which accounts for 95 per cent of malaria deaths globally,” the statement reads.
The agency also noted that globally the number of cases in 2022 was significantly higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic, rising to 249 million from 233 million in 2019. In the same period, the African region saw an increase in cases from 218 million to 233 million. The region continues to shoulder the heaviest malaria burden, representing 94 per cent of global malaria cases and 95 per cent of global deaths, an estimated 580000 deaths in 2022, the WHO said.
