Fighting Malaria With Insecticide-treated Nets
The Alliance for Malaria Prevention (AMP) Partnership focuses on scaling up efforts to prevent malaria through achieving and sustaining access to, and use of, insecticide treated nets (ITNs) and is made up of partners who both uniquely understand and are affected by this challenge.
Established in 2004, AMP, housed and chaired by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is a global Partnership including government, private sector, faith-based and humanitarian organizations. AMP is a member of the Country/Regional Support Partner Committee (CRSPC) of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership to End Malaria (RBM), which provides a platform to engage the RBM Partnership community by coordinating support to countries and regions as they execute their malaria control and elimination programmes. ITNs have been shown to reduce uncomplicated malaria incidence by 50 per cent and all-cause child mortality by 17 per cent[1], accelerating progress towards the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Technical Strategy (GTS) targets[2].
Through its coordination of partners within the malaria community working on ITN distribution, AMP tracks progress against planned ITN distributions globally, and advocates for resource mobilization in support of members’ shared priorities and the resolution of ITN distribution challenges. AMP helps to build capacity and skills of national malaria programme (NMP) and partner organization staff, focusing on ITN campaign and continuous distribution (CD) planning, logistics, social and behaviour change (SBC), digitalization, and monitoring and evaluation. AMP also provides operational guidance through comprehensive toolkits focused on ITN campaigns, ITN CD and ITN distribution in complex operating environments (COE). The extensively consulted ITN toolkits serves as base documents and are complemented by the addition of resources of different kinds, such as case studies, reports, adaptable and assessment tools, and operational guidance documents based on experiences from countries implementing ITN distribution in a wide variety of contexts.
Malaria Burden
Malaria is a preventable and treatable infectious disease transmitted by female anopheles mosquitoes. Despite significant progress achieved over the past decades in the flight against the disease, malaria continues to kill nearly 600,000 people each year and remains the leading cause of death for children under five in sub-Saharan Africa.
Efforts to curb rates of malaria have slowed in recent years due to disruptions from climate change, conflicts, drug and insecticide resistance as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. According to WHO’s latest World malaria report[3], there were an estimated 263 million cases and 597,000 malaria deaths worldwide in 2023. This represents about 11 million more cases in 2023 compared to 2022, and nearly the same number of deaths. In 2023, sub-Saharan Africa continued to bear the heaviest malaria burden, with 95 per cent of deaths globally. Countries in this region are disproportionally affected by the disease that perpetuates a cycle of inequality and poverty due to the growing economic impact of malaria.
ITNs are the primary vector control tool used in most malaria endemic countries. During 2023, three billion nets had been shipped to prevent malaria worldwide[4]. In 2024, a total of 184 million ITNs were distributed through all channels by national malaria programmes in malaria-endemic countries (90 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa). Distribution of insecticide-treated nets as a core intervention to control and eliminate malaria remains critical in reducing transmission and mortality rate. Sleeping under an ITN provides protection from malaria-carrying mosquitoes and has been shown to reduce malaria incidence by 50 per cent and all-cause child mortality by 17 per cent[5]. Since 2002 many countries, through the strong leadership of Ministries of Health, have successfully implemented large-scale campaigns to deliver over three billion ITNs to help reduce malaria cases and deaths.