As a five-year malaria service delivery project of the U.S President’s Malaria Initiative, PMI Impact Malaria (IM) provides global technical leadership through implementation support, technical assistance, and operational research in health facility and community settings across Africa and Asia.

For the second year of the project, IM continued activities to support the national malaria control programs (NMCPs) of 14 countries in their efforts to fight malaria and save lives through strengthening diagnosis, treatment, and drug-based prevention for those most at risk of malaria, particularly young children and pregnant women.

IM focused intensively on building a high caliber, collaborative team in countries and at headquarters, with the expertise and leadership needed to achieve impact. In supporting the work of NMCPs, IM has advanced malaria service delivery through a focus on quality improvement and country self-reliance as its backbone, setting the stage for sustainable, accelerated impact both nationally and globally during the project’s third year and beyond.

This is a snapshot of country-driven achievement highlights that IM supported during the past year:

• Conducted malaria service delivery assessments in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Mali to tailor in-country approaches and activities to on-the-ground realities and used the findings to establish the pre-IM implementation status of malaria case management (CM) and malaria in pregnancy (MIP) activities in eight of IM’s focus countries.
• Established an enhanced approach to training and supportive supervision through development of the OTSS+ framework and implemented it in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ghana, and Zambia.
• Brought malaria diagnosis policy, guidelines, and job aids into alignment with World Health Organization (WHO) global guidelines in DRC, Madagascar, and Sierra Leone—providing a gold standard, particularly in the case of Sierra Leone, for other countries to adopt a more robust approach to malaria diagnosis.
• Trained over 3,000 health providers in seven countries— Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Madagascar, and Zambia—using malaria treatment policies, guidelines, and job aids that were updated to meet global standards for malaria treatment.
• Provided technical support to seven countries—Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, and Sierra Leone—in establishing or revitalizing their national MIP technical working groups (TWGs) to optimize coordination of MIP interventions between the malaria and reproductive health units of Ministries of Health (MOH).
• Expanded access to malaria service delivery by supporting Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Niger in their efforts to bring integrated community case management (iCCM) programs into the national primary health care system and establish sustainable structures that the government can support in the future.
• Implemented seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) campaigns in Cameroon, Mali, and Niger to prevent malaria in about 3.7 million children.
• Supported the WHO technical consultation on the engagement of the private sector in malaria case management by leading a literature review, conducting key informant interviews with national and global stakeholders, and applying learnings to contribute to forthcoming WHO private sector guidance.
• Developed a project monitoring system, called the IM Data Hub, to enable IM and NMCPs to rapidly review data, use evidence to make decisions that advance malaria service delivery, and identify trends across countries that highlight strengths and areas in need of greater attention.
• Organized a malaria elimination planning workshop to develop Madagascar’s malaria elimination plan and surveillance protocol for elimination-targeted districts, and conducted a feasibility assessment to prepare for the implementation of elimination activities in two pilot districts.
• Launched multiple digital communications platforms—including IM’s online photo library, which has about 500 photos and received over 47,000 views—to house and share content that captures IM's impact, learning, and evidence.

Header Photo Credit: Kathryn Malhotra, PMI Impact Malaria. Caption: SMC distributor Drocas Dako marks a household after administering antimalarial medication to six children living there in Médine, Segou Region during the second cycle of Mali's SMC campaign in August 2019.

PMI Impact Malaria is funded and technically assisted by the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) and is led by Population Services International (PSI) in partnership with Jhpiego, Medical Care Development International (MCDI), and the Malaria Elimination Initiative (MEI) at UC San Francisco.