The Private Sector and Malaria

Albert Kilian describes the complexities of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention in this chapter. Malaria is a major killer in the developing world. In 2012, approximately 207 million episodes of clinical malaria occurred, leading to the deaths of an estimated 627,000 people – mostly African, mostly children, and mostly poor. Programs to reduce malaria mortality focus on prevention, often mosquito abatement or the use of nets to prevent mosquito bites at night, or treatment, increasingly with effective combinations of effective medicines.This chapter examines the experience with malaria programs and private sector engagement to shed light on when and how the private sector can contribute to delivering malaria interventions. We examine how the habits and operating norms of the agencies and people involved in the global malaria effort have influenced the consideration and deployment of such strategies.Through a series of case studies, we argue that while malaria programs have achieved remarkable increases in net ownership and use deployment, they have faced rather more difficulty increasing treatment coverage. This is at least, in part, because national malaria programs’ focus on speed, product procurement, and distribution has discouraged the development of strategies to mobilize private drug sellers, net producers, distributors, and retailers. Program managers and donors, in many countries, need to shift to diversifying their strategies, adding private sector channels, so that programs can achieve broader goals.