The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Muhammad Ali Pate, says Nigeria has not been able to eliminate malaria 70 years since it began implementing programmes to eliminate the disease, due to “insufficient focus and commitment.”

He said 24 years ago after the African Summit on Roll Back Malaria in Abuja (popularly known as Abuja Declaration on Roll Back Malaria) Nigeria still bears 30 percent of the global burden, with an estimated annual 68 million cases and over 194,000 deaths from the disease.

The minister said this in his opening remarks at the Roundtable Discussion on Rethinking Malaria Elimination in Nigeria, held in Abuja.

The minister said although the Roll Back Malaria Initiative achieved remarkable progress such as increased funding for malaria control efforts in Africa, both from domestic sources and international donors, gaps still exist.

Such gaps, according to the minister were in the areas of raising enough awareness on the severity of malaria, mobilizing enough financial and technical resources to support malaria control efforts in Nigeria and African, invested in strengthening our health systems towards improving malaria prevention, diagnosis, and treatment targeting infrastructure, training healthcare workers, and improving access to essential malaria interventions, among other.

The minister said that for Nigeria and Africa to eliminate malaria all critical stakeholders must “utilize newer evidence-based tools, quality data systems, strengthen collaborations, develop smarter financing models, and new procurement modalities to suit our realities in Nigeria as well as the African continent.

He said: “We must reimagine the routine approaches that have so far defined our interventions over the recent years.

“Nigeria, African countries and the global malaria community must also reinvent approaches to address the constraints that prevent efficient delivery of existing effective key malaria control strategies and forthcoming innovations and tools. Tools for the control of the disease have evolved both in quantity and quality over the years.”

The minister said despite the availability of new tools, commitment by countries towards the elimination of the disease could not be sustained as budgets for healthcare across countries on the continent dwindled over time, and only a few countries could achieve the Abuja targets.

He said several novel strategies and interventions have been deployed and scaled up in Nigeria towards the elimination of malaria.

Some of these strategies, according to him, include the introduction of artemisinin-based combination treatments as treatment, the Affordable Medicine Facility for Malaria (AMFm) to make antimalarial medicines available and affordable, and training of community-oriented resource persons on recognizing and treating malaria.

He said: “Over 140 million have also been distributed since 2010 through campaigns and routine distribution to households.

“One of the latest interventions is the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC), which protects children below the age of five years from malaria attacks, and this has been scaled up from the initial 9 states in the Sahelian region at onset to cover 23 states across areas with seasonal rainfall in the country.”

He said the launch of the Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative [NHSRII] by President Bola Tinubu in December 2023 was part of the Federal Government’s efforts to improve quality health delivery for all Nigerians. (The Nation)

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