Fighting a Disease without Borders

Although malaria is preventable and treatable, the World Health Organization reports that malaria affects between 300 and 500 million people per year. And malaria still claims the lives of more than 1 million children every year. Malaria's impact on health systems and fragile economies is devastating to developing countries and their people. The fight against the disease is plagued by financial limitations, lack of community awareness, and drug-resistant malaria strains.

But with support from the US Agency for International Development, Management Sciences for Health (MSH) is helping to build sustainable malaria control approaches and programs. The Action for West Africa Region/Reproductive Health (AWARE-RH) program recently used a best practices approach in Sierra Leone to replicate a peer health education model from the Gambia. Working with the Sierra Leone chapter of the Nova Scotia-Gambia Association (NSGA), the program trained nearly 900 peer educators in effective youth response to malaria and another 300 community health workers in disease prevention and control skills.

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