More than a Spoonful of Medicine

What does it take to prevent malaria? Some of the programs GiveWell recommends might sound straightforward—for example, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) programs provide antimalarial drugs to young children—but the process of accomplishing this is not simple at all.
Below, we offer a post from Malaria Consortium that describes the many complex steps required to carry out an SMC campaign. See our reports for more information about the evidence for SMC and about Malaria Consortium’s SMC program.
You can read the original post on Malaria Consortium’s website.
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Distributing anti-malaria medicines to 25 million children: The supply chain step-by-step
Ashley Giles, Nkoli Nnamonu and Lawrence Ekeocha, August 16, 2023
Author’s note: This blog is an update from the original article published in 2019. Since then, Malaria Consortium’s SMC activities have grown from targeting six million children to 25 million children in 2023. This expansion has taken place as a result of geographic expansion to new areas of Nigeria, in addition to SMC implementation research in Mozambique, South Sudan and Uganda. The work continues to take place in close collaboration with national malaria programmes and generous support from philanthropists and institutional donors.
The moment a community distributor gives a spoonful of life-saving malaria medicine to each of 25 million children across sub-Saharan Africa this year, it marks the finish line of a long and winding road from manufacturer to community.
Since 2013, Malaria Consortium has supported the transportation and distribution of medicines for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), an intervention recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), in areas where malaria transmission peaks during the rainy season. SMC involves the distribution of full courses of safe and effective antimalarial medication (a combination of two drugs, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) and amodiaquine (AQ) in four monthly intervals, or five in some regions, during the rainy season to those most at risk: children under five. The aim is to maintain sufficient levels of antimalarial drugs in children’s bloodstreams throughout the period when malaria transmission is at its highest. SMC, which has been implemented in areas of West Africa since 2013, has now expanded to include communities in parts of East and southern Africa. In 2022, Malaria Consortium reached children in seven countries: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan, Togo and Uganda.
Warehouse at health centre in Karamoja, Uganda
So how do the drugs reach

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