Another World Malaria Day? Celebrating Mosquito Nets!

On the occasion of another celebration of World Malaria Day(25th April), Malaria ‘experts’ and NGO allies will be moving from one media house to another trumpeting the benefits of using mosquito nets and organizing various events to mark the day.

Volunteer Partnerships for West Africa and NGO News Africa, the authoritative news portal dedicated to NGOs in Africa, wish to unequivocally express its dismay at the continuous and abysmal projects currently on-going across sub-Saharan Africa to tackle the menace.

On this day, we shall witness various malaria control agencies that are trumpeting their successes on the use  of mosquito nets in the claimed reduction of malaria and the  loud voices calling for cash injections into Malaria programmes.

The Roll Back Malaria (RBM), I expect, will use the platform to call for renewal of commitment and partnerships from governments and donors to support their Global Malaria Action Plan. But  we deem current interventions as marginally effective and unsustainable. There is the need for critical thinking to stop the insanity of pursuing strategies that will in no way result in a malaria-free society in our part of the world. Twelve people dying every day from malaria is catastrophic to Ghana’s national development and it is disheartening to hear claims that ‘Ghana’s malaria situation is stable’.

Research has found that, mosquito nets and Indoor Residual Spraying are only 25% effective, respectively. Studies  carried out  in some parts of West Africa show that 38% of anopheles mosquito bites occur outdoors. As a consequence, bed nets and Indoor Residual Spraying will never break the malaria transmission cycle.

We want to use this platform to call for a discerning overview of current strategies before the situation in Ghana and the rest of Africa gets out of hand.

Since 2007 when World Malaria Day was first celebrated, malaria still continuous to kill two people every minute globally and in Ghana two people  every four hours. Three years on and the situation has not changed. ! Our proposal for an efficient aerial spraying programme may be  seen expensive and is claimed to be environmentally-unfriendly but no one has been able to come up with an effective way to halt the menace.

A word to a wise, is enough!

Hayford Siaw

Executive Director- Volunteer Partnerships for West Africa

Editor-In-Chief – NGO News Africa.

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