African Leader’s Malaria Alliance
ALMA supported the 32nd Ordinary Summit of the African Union where discussions revolved around the theme of “Refugees, Returnees, and Internally Displaced Persons: Towards Durable Solutions to Force Displacement in Africa”.
ALMA has also been working on the 2018 scorecards reports. The Initiative’s aim is to reinforce the regional platform and create international synergy to eliminate malaria. Support for the initiative is strong and with the introduction of the sub-regional scorecard keeping track of progress will allow them to focus on the most vulnerable areas.
Asia Pacific Leader’s Malaria Alliance
APLMA has been active in supporting various events and conferences. For example, they have helped advertise Unitaid’s call for proposals to develop better, more efficient treatments that will help bring about the end of malaria and encourage the M2030 awareness and fundraising campaign supporting malaria elimination in Myanmar.
February was also an important month as APLMA convened a panel of senior officials in New Delhi to discuss the global fight to end malaria, outlining strategies to improve collaboration, increase investment and identify innovative approaches to eliminate the disease and stop drug-resistance. The event took place on the sidelines of the preparatory meeting for the Global Fund's Sixth Replenishment, hosted by the Government of India.
Additionally on the global front, Japan hosted the G20 Finance Minister and Central Bank Governors Deputy Meeting in Tokyo where universal Health Coverage (UHC) and the future of health financing were high on the agenda with focus on the fight against malaria and other communicable diseases. In fact, Japan will host the first ever joint session of Health and Finance Ministers in the G20 making this an opportunity to focus on the fight against malaria, and more broadly for health financing. APLMA is committed to supporting these seminal moments – to ensure a useful outcome and keep malaria elimination in Asia Pacific as a priority.
The President’s Malaria Initiative
PMI was recently part of a US leadership event that addressed U.S. supported successes and strategies in the fight against malaria. Other organizations in the effort include the Global Fund to End AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets. The briefing highlighted that since July 2018, PMI, the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation have been working to aggregate and homogenize each entities’ data and share it with countries while ramping up data collection efforts in order to more quickly and more precisely drive down the malaria burden with fewer resources.
More news worthy of mention is that PMI was featured for its work on malaria elimination and drug resistance in a broadcast of PBS NewsHour. As part of the Under-Told Stories Project, some of the segment focuses on a PMI-supported pilot program in Western Cambodia, as well as a rapid detection and reporting program to track and contain outbreaks, especially any cases that do not respond to drugs.
PMI is also launching several new initiatives to help transform data utilization. To that end, PMI will be reviewing program data quarterly instead of annually, has begun to develop a single integrated platform to house all data open to partners, and working closely with the Global Fund and Gates Foundation to adopt a set of common data definitions across donors to eliminate redundancies and maximize efficiency.
The Global Fund to Fight HIV, TB, and Malaria
At the kick-off meeting of the Global Fund’s Sixth Replenishment in New Delhi, leaders, global health organizations, civil society groups and people affected by the diseases vowed collective action to end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and accelerate progress toward universal health coverage.
Luxembourg has become the first country to pledge for the Global Fund’s Sixth Replenishment fundraising drive. Luxembourg is one of the Global Fund’s largest donors per capita, and the country has steadily increased its pledge each Replenishment cycle. Their commitment of EUR 9 million is an 11 percent increase over their previous pledge. The Global Fund is seeking to raise at least US$14 billion for the next three years to help save 16 million lives, cut the mortality rate from HIV, TB and malaria in half, and build stronger health systems by 2023.
The Global Fund has been also been busy with an audit if its multicountry grants process which are designed to accelerate the end of the HIV, TB and malaria epidemics and to strengthen health systems by tackling regional bottlenecks and cross-border issues. To date, multicountry grants have faced challenges in their implementation; 71% of the multicountry/regional grants selected for review by the OIG performed below expectation at the last progress update in December 2017. One particular challenge faced by multicountry grants is the inability of current regional data systems to provide quality and timely programmatic data, while another relates to the alignment of various country reporting standards to ensure regional data is available.