Rolling back malaria

The nets are helping those most vulnerable

Malaria continues to be the biggest killer of small children in Africa, each year malaria is responsible for more than one million child deaths. One of the most powerful tools for malaria prevention are bed nets treated with insecticide, these nets help stop mosquitoes transmitting the most deadly forms of the malaria parasite to humans.

Getting treated bed nets to children and pregnant women in rural Africa, and encouraging them to sleep under these nets, is one of the greatest public health challenges Plan faces in Africa today.

In Kita, about three hours from the Malian capital of Bamako, Plan and its partners have recently recorded a remarkable success. Four years ago, when Plan started an intensified programme to improve child survival in Kita, fewer than 4% of children in the district slept under a treated bed net.

Last month, a survey carried out by an independent research team among 392 randomly selected households in villages surrounding Kita found that this figure had halved - all but 2% of children under five had slept under a correctly treated bed net the previous night.

It is a result rarely achieved anywhere in Africa, and local health centres are already reporting a dramatic decline in consultations for children with fever.

Working in partnership

In the District of Kita, Plan works in partnership with UNICEF which provides bed nets to health centres for free distribution to women registering for antenatal care, and to children who have completed the initial course of childhood immunisation, usually at the age of about 12 months.

Plan supports volunteer community committees in charge of health centre administration. These committees supervise the immunisation and antenatal care records and manage medications and bed nets. They visit the homes of children who have not been immunised and urge the parents to bring them to the clinic.

Members of a two merged local health organisations visit the homes in their villages regularly to talk about good nutrition, hand washing, garbage disposal, and other practices that are essential to good health. They also look at the state of the bed nets, and make recommendations about how to care for them and how to suspend them.

These Plan partnerships in Mali and a combination of well-targeted free distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and trained community volunteers ensuing that these bed nets are used correctly, show that malaria in Africa can be beaten and that those most vulnerable can be protected from this disease.