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.

Outreach activities for malaria prevention and control included community film shows and dramatic skits performed by schoolchildren and women, which gave all members of the community an opportunity to discuss the disease. The project covered a total of 950,000 people in both countries. Hundreds of T-shirts, posters, manuals, and registers were printed to support the program.

The regional approach to health development is vital for transferring best practices throughout West Africa. Replicating and scaling up programs can be easily achieved once their impact, affordability, and appropriateness have been demonstrated. In this case, the replication of the education program in the Gambia led to the national introduction of artemisinin-based combination therapy as the first-line treatment for malaria. AWARE-RH worked with the Department of State for Health and Welfare to introduce the new treatment, which is the World Health Organization’s recommended therapy for malaria control.

The results of AWARE-RH can also be seen at the community level in the Gambia, where the impact of the disease is most evident. The AWARE-RH/NSGA approach to malaria control inspired leaders in the village of Albreda to buy bednets for the poor. A leader in another community said that fewer women are ill with malaria now while working in the rice fields during the rainy season.

Another important aspect of control and prevention is awareness. And it couldn’t have been clearer than the message on the project's shirts: Our Community, Our Malaria. Let’s fight together.

For more information about World Malaria Day 2008, visit the Roll Back Malaria Partnership website.