GHD Executive Director Dr. Rebecca Weintraub and Case Writer Kileken ole-MoiYoi, recently returned from the seventh National Malaria Control Program (NMCP) Best Practice Sharing Workshop in Bamako, Mali. The NMCP workshop was co-chaired by Bob Snow, Professor of Tropical Public Health at the University of Oxford and head of the Malaria Public Health and Epidemiology Group in Nairobi Kenya, and Dr. Ali Abdullah, the program manager of the Zanzibar NMCP. Novartis AG has hosted the Best Practice Sharing Workshops as part of its Corporate Citizenship programs and as a stage for officials to share and learn from one another’s experiences in malaria control.

The topics of discussion were directly related to the main challenges that NMCP managers face in their countries; the workshop focused on issues related to supply chain management of anti-malarials, appropriate diagnosis and treatment of malaria, home-based management, and the global subsidy for artemisinin-based combination therapy for treating malaria. Several NMCP managers presented updates on the progress made in each of their countries since the previous Best Practice Sharing Workshop and discussed challenges that have since arisen.

The GHD hopes to work more closely with various NMCP managers and will complete a case study on the Zambian National Malaria Control program in the coming months. The GHD’s malaria program is developing a malaria teaching module that will focus on several of the challenges mentioned by NMCP directors to improve program management and the effective and timely delivery of malaria related health commodities and services.