MAP is working in a collaborative partnership with the Zambia National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP) to provide broad ranging analytical support for malaria elimination in the country. Formalise through a Memorandum of Understanding, MAP is working jointly with the NMEP, providing much-needed analytics support to the Programme during their 2022-2026 Malaria strategic Plan implementation. The primary areas of support identified include i) guiding malaria risk stratification, ii) generating robust sub-national malaria burden estimates and assessing trends and spatial heterogeneity, and iii) strengthening malaria outbreak detection and prediction using risk factors such as environmental/climate and intervention data to help improve early warning systems.
The work on outbreak detection and prediction will learn from past outbreaks, anticipate the effects of future malaria outbreaks, and minimise expected setbacks. Applying geospatial models that integrate the malaria routine surveillance report with real-time climate data to produce outbreak alerts and predictions in Zambia will provide rapid feedback on emerging outbreaks and the impact of intervention campaigns, thus enabling the programme to respond more quickly and effectively. This will help safeguard the recent strides made and accelerate Zambia’s progress toward malaria control and subnational elimination efforts. The enhanced risk stratification will guide operational optimisation in implementing malaria control interventions to speed up progress towards the goals set by the NMEP.
This collaboration has the potential to enhance malaria surveillance, monitoring, evaluation, and informed decision-making. The resultant analytical capacity building and training within the NMEP will support the programme to best utilise surveillance and research data to generate relevant evidence for decisions in strategic planning. Overall, the effort further responds to the WHO Global Malaria Programme recommendations for malaria control to inform national and subnational malaria strategies on i) the utilisation of local routine surveillance data and ii) conducting risk stratification utilising multiple metrics.
Collaborators
This work would be done in close collaboration with the NMEP and other local stakeholders, mainly:
- National Malaria Elimination Programme, Lusaka, Zambia.
- PATH/MACEPA, Lusaka, Zambia
- Other local partners