MALARIA CONSORTIUM US

Country: Burkina Faso

Project: Extending SMC to children in urban areas

Year: 2019

Grant Amount: $250,000

Activities

In 2019, a grant of $250,000 was awarded to Malaria Consortium’s SMC program in Burkina Faso, following a request for support from the National Malaria Control Program (Programme national de Lutte contre le Paludisme) to support SMC implementation in five urban districts in Ouagadougou.

SMC is a treatment course of antimalarial medicines that prevent malaria in children under five (3-59 months) during the rainy season, when cases of malaria are highest. This was the first time SMC was implemented in urban areas in Burkina Faso and enabled the national SMC program to reach 100 percent of health districts in the country.

The grant was used to support all four cycles of the SMC campaign in the five urban districts, including supporting district health authorities and communities in planning, coordinating, and implementing SMC, and training and supervision of the community SMC distributors, National Medical Store fees and a coverage survey following third monthly cycle.

Impact

The grant supported the delivery of SMC for approximately 60,000 children under five. Hear about the impact of the SMC campaign from a community health worker in Burkina Faso.

Country: Cambodia

Project: Strengthening case detection and malaria elimination efforts

Year: 2019

Grant Amount: $100,000

Activities

In 2019, an unrestricted grant of $100,000 awarded to the Accelerated Malaria Elimination project aimed to improve health outcomes for an estimated 24,000 people in northeastern Cambodia in the Preah Vihear and Stung Treng Provinces. The grant contributed to maintaining Cambodia’s malaria pre-elimination efforts by countering the spread of multidrug resistant P. falciparum malaria among residents, local forest goers, plantation workers and migrants who were most at risk of malaria by:

• Strengthening passive case detection of two types of malaria (P. falciparum and P. vivax) by training and supporting Village Malaria Workers (VMW) to assess the rate of malaria testing at health centers and ensuring there were no stock outs of test kits or treatments.
• Strengthening community-based pro-active and re-active case detection of P. falciparum and P. vivax malaria through a network of villagers and mobile health workers to screen and appropriately treat those in the targeted populations, as well as complete case investigations for those who test positive for P. falciparum.
• Ensuring full coverage of bed nets, especially among mobile and migrant populations.

Impact

Village malaria workers and health workers tested 12,400 people through passive and active case detection and as a result the number of positive malaria cases dropped from 73 to 18 by March 2020, preventing the reservoir of malaria cases from growing. In June 2018 the annual recorded malaria parasite incidence for malaria cases per 1,000 population was 1.23, by March 2020 it was reduced to 0.3, this contributed significantly to malaria pre-elimination outcomes in this area of the country.

Country: Mozambique

Project: Building digital health capacity

Year: 2019

Grant Amount: $100,000

Activities

In 2019, an unrestricted grant of $100,000 was awarded to help address key bottlenecks to quality health service delivery by community health workers (known as APEs in Mozambique), identified through Malaria Consortium’s upSCALE project, including supply chain management, service delivery and referral, health worker supervision and health information systems. The grant was awarded to help the upSCALE project to address these bottlenecks, by:

• Enhancing the upSCALE platform to include new clinical modules for APEs on conjunctivitis, First Aid, scabies, early childhood development, and a COVID-19 symptom tracker. The supervisor reports were updated to include tracking and referral control, illustration of the types of diseases and how frequently they are reported, and updates to the stock management modules to better monitor and assist APEs. The upSCALE data interoperability with DHIS2 was also updated to integrate new program DHIS2 indicators for these new clinical models.
• Monthly service subscription payments for APEs and supervisor’s mobile airtime and data use was bundled for approximately 2,700 users to enable ongoing platform use.
• Updating the upSCALE implementation manual to provide the Ministry of Health with a guiding document that describes all technical areas (digital, M&E, communications and community health approach) with regards to upSCALE.
• Local companies contracted in each implementation province to repair damaged mobile phones.
• Provinces with low performing mobile workers were identified using monitoring tools and frequent phone-call checkups. Supervision trips were then conducted, with scheduled visits that lasted on average one to two weeks, in order to resolve the different issues mobile workers faced with their phones/app.

Impact

The upSCALE project was expanded to four new provinces (Maputo, Gaza, Sofala and Nampula) between October 2020 and February 2021. This included procurement of new equipment, creating user services, training, and platform management. The grant helped to train APEs, supervisors and to make the platform revisions and cover the service provider fees. The remainder covered the cost and maintenance of equipment, and data monitoring.

Country: Mozambique

Project: Adapting digital health to COVID-19

Year: 2020

Grant Amount: $100,000

Activities

A grant of $100,000 was awarded to rapidly build on the upSCALE platform and use telemedicine to support the COVID-19 response at community level in Mozambique.

As Mozambique became affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, and restrictions to travel for group meetings and training were put in place, the Ministry of Health recognized the need to accurately train APEs remotely on how to prevent transmission of COVID-19 and identify symptoms. They also identified the need to update the upSCALE application to enable APEs to differentiate a diagnosis between COVID-19, malaria and pneumonia.

Regular updates to the digital content with COVID-19 adaptations as new evidence about the virus became available were made to SMS messaging, training modules, stock control and disease surveillance. data at a national level. The new platform was demonstrated and tested with 1,199 health workers and 342 supervisors in three provinces.

Impact

As a result of this grant, upSCALE integrated a diagnostic algorithm for COVID-19 and differential diagnosis for malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea, delivering COVID-19 disease messaging and awareness materials via the app and SMS texts. The stock management system was updated to include COVID-19 materials such as face masks and gloves and a COVID-19 dashboard for national disease surveillance was developed.

Country: Nigeria

Project: Increasing access to essential medicines for SMC

Year: 2020

Grant Amount: $723,949

Activities

Malaria Consortium’s SMC program was awarded $723,949 to support procurement and coordinate a shipment of quality-assured blister pack doses of SMC medicines (SPAQ), for an estimated 470,000 children in two Nigerian states, Jigawa and Kebbi.

Impact

The grant contributed to successful delivery of SMC between July and November 2020 in Jigawa and Kebbi states including in areas where SMC had not previously been implemented. More than 1.7 million SPAQ medicine blister packs were consumed over the course of the 2020 SMC campaign, reducing malaria infections in close to half a million children under five years-old.

Country: Uganda

Project: Strengthening community case management through digital health solutions

Year: 2020

Grant Amount: $170,000

Activities

$170,000 was awarded to support the integrated community case management (iCCM) program in the central region of Uganda to pilot the upSCALE digital platform to capture community health worker data in the Buikwe district and test if mhealth applications can be used to improve community health worker motivation through mentorship with the expectation that the quality of malaria care would be improved. 

This program is ongoing, to date, the development of the upSCALE mobile app has been completed including the diagnostic and treatment modules for malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea and COVID-19.  All phones and sim cards for the community health workers have been purchased and a local mobile phone provider has been contracted to provide unlimited cellular data.  Trainers are currently being trained how to use the mobile software and the phones are being programed and tested for access and security permissions with the national health surveillance system.  The next step will be to train the community health workers and test the program.

Impact

If the program is found to be feasible, effectively improving community health data capture and community health worker motivation and service delivery, it is expected the Ministry of Health will scale it up across the country.  This will depend on available funding with continued donor support.

Country: South Sudan

Project: Supporting Community health workers to better manage malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, malnutrition and immunization

Year: 2020

Grant Amount: $150,000

Activities

A grant of $150,000 was awarded to address a funding gap in South Sudan’s Boma Health Initiative.

The Boma Health Initiative was launched in 2016 by the Government of the Republic of South Sudan to improve the reach of health services in communities and included the delivery of an integrated package of health promotion, disease prevention and selected treatment packages by community health workers to help bridge the gap between health facilities and communities.

Impact

The grant enabled the successful roll out of the Boma Health initiative leading to the recruitment and training of 570 Boma Health Initiative community health workers on management of child health in the community which included malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, malnutrition and immunization. These community health workers were able to reach an estimated 1.2 million children in three counties of Warrap State (Gogrial East, West and Twic) and two counties of Upper Nile state (Nasir and Ulang).

Country: Uganda

Project: Groundbreaking research on COVID-19 and malaria co-infection

Year: 2020-21

Grant Amount: $175,000

Activities

$175,000 was awarded to Malaria Consortium’s research team in Uganda to conduct research to understand interactions and clinical consequences of co-infection of COVID-19 and malaria. The study was conducted from April to October 2020 at COVID-19 treatment centers in eight tertiary hospitals in Uganda.

Results from this ground-breaking research, were published in The Lancet Microbe journal and learnings from the process of conducting the research were published in the European Journal of Clinical Medicine and presented to multiple stakeholders in Uganda including the Ministry of Health, USAID, and CDC, as well as to the COVID-19 and Malaria working groups at the World Health Organization, to the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation and the University of California San Francisco.

Impact