Health Systems &Morbidity &Mortality Bill Brieger | 08 Nov 2007 08:22 am
Measuring Malaria
The new series in The Lancet, “Who Counts?”, has serious implications for malaria programming and funding. Without being able to count the expected decreases in morbidity and mortality, program managers will lack the credibility to ask for continuing support. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Philip Osafo-Kwaako explain that, “First, without adequate capacity for obtaining statistics, assessment of the magnitude of the development problems to be faced is often impossible. Second, if we get the numbers wrong, tackling development problems effectively is difficult.” They conclude that, “Governments and donors must view reliable data as an important tool in the development process, and must invest both financial and human resources in strengthening their statistical systems.”
Philip Setel and colleagues in the first of the “Who Counts?” series raise the question, “How much longer support for efforts to expand immunisation, and confront AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria will last is questionable if counting the lives saved, and providing direct evidence of reduction of deaths due to these causes—particularly in the poorest of the poor—remains undone?” They worry that few countries in Africa have the capacity to measure the indicators for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, including those related to malaria and its effects on maternal and child health.
AbouZahr et al., in the fourth article in the series note that with new funding sources like GAVI and GFATM “pay particular attention to the importance of monitoring and evaluation, and could represent new opportunities to strengthen country capacities in vital statistics.” To this end the Global Fund provides a Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit to grantees and their partners. This supports GFATM’s emphasis on performance based funding.
In the area of childhood immunizations GAVI is also “results oriented” and helps strengthen health systems to collect accurate country data. GAVI also has a Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Advisory Group. More Specific malaria monitoring and evaluation resources can be obtained from the Roll Back Malaria Monitoring and Evaluation Reference Group.
Two big challenges exist in order to make viable malaria M&E possible. First there is need to ensure that the existing health information system data collection processes – the forms, the registers, the summary sheets, the surveys – adequately and appropriately address key malaria indicators. Secondly, like in the HIV/AIDS ‘three ones’, there needs to be a unified malaria M&E system from community to national level that is used by all programs and partners – public, private and NGO.