Malaria financing cuts will rob children of their futures – here’s what we can do to stop it

For those who have never had been, Botswana is a breathtakingly beautiful country in southern Africa. It’s home to the awe-inspiring Okavango delta, equally inspiring people – and it’s also my home and the country where I once served as minister of health.Like many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, however, Botswana also suffers from one of the world’s oldest and deadliest killers – malaria.Across Africa, this disease claims the lives of around 600,000 people every year; around three quarters of whom are children under five. As Botswana’s minister of health, I fought this injustice every day and saw first-hand the impacts it can have on children’s lives.Because the disease doesn’t only claim lives, it steals our children’s dreams. There are around 282 million cases of the disease every year and the lives of those who fall sick and survive are often changed forever. Malaria No More UK have published a new report exploring these impacts and specifically the consequences of malaria on educational outcomes and job prospects.Take Saada: a 17-year-old from Tanzania who spoke to Malaria No More UK’s researchers. She has aspirations of becoming a doctor but her education was derailed by malaria. She caught the disease at school and says it stopped her from being able to see the words in her books and exam papers properly: “Everything looked dark and misty,” she told the researchers. The fatigue hindered her exam performance; she could see her peers writing around her whilst she fought sleep in the exam hall.Or take 15-year-old Adam, also from Tanzania, who wants to be an engineer. After he caught malaria, he couldn’t get out of bed and he missed two weeks of school. As a result, he says he got Bs when he would have got As. For our children, all of this adds up. “Lost learning, lost earning”, the new Malaria No More UK report, shows that young adults in sub-Saharan Africa entering the workforce today are thought to have lost an average of nearly 100 school days due to malaria. That’s more than half a school year. This can send shockwaves throughout the rest of a young person’s life. The researchers also found that the same young adults are projected to lose at least 10 per cent of their lifetime earnings as a result of the disease. Unfortunately, this situation is predicted to get worse with a potential resurgence in malaria anticipated due to a perfect storm of challenges. These include rising temperatures from climate change and extreme weather events like flooding, as well as growing mosquito resistance, the spread of new breeds of mosquito and Africa’s growing population.And funding cuts reducing our ability to respond to all this. Indeed, Malaria No More UK’s new report projects that certain cuts to malaria budgets could lead to an increase of 18 per cent in lost school days and potential lifetime earnings as a result of this increase in the spread of the disease. We simply cannot allow this to happen. This is why we are calling on malaria-endemic countries to step up domestic funding, both from public and private sectors, for effective programmes to fight malaria. This means malaria must be a “non-negotiable” in national budgets, even as partners mobilise additional funding.Strong global health bodies, like Gavi and the Global Fund, are critical too and are attracting new philanthropic partners keen to get life-saving tools to those who need them. For example, I very much welcome the announcement of ‘The Malaria Impact Accelerator’ as laudable way of channelling philanthropic money through the efficient channels already developed by the Global Fund and countries. And the leadership of malaria-endemic countries also remains key in determining how resources should be used.As this new report from Malaria No More UK makes clear, such investments in malaria funding are not only the right thing to do but are down-payments in Africa’s future. By protecting the next generation and nurturing a healthier society, we can grow a more economically prosperous continent. With the threat of a resurgence now upon us and the futures of the next generation at stake, we simply cannot afford not to act.Joy Phumaphi is executive secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance and a former minister of health of BotswanaThis article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project