MCD Global Health is part of a consortium, led by Palladium, that was awarded the five-year U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative Advancing Health and Malaria Services Program in Niger (PMI AHMS Niger).
The goal is to increase the coverage and use of key life-saving malaria interventions in support of Niger’s National Malaria Strategic Plan and build the human resources capacity of the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP). The program will focus on supporting malaria prevention and case management (i.e., diagnosis and treatment) at the facility and community levels through integrated community case management (iCCM), malaria in pregnancy, seasonal malaria chemoprevention, monitoring and evaluation, and social and behavioral change interventions integrated into the design of malaria services to increase uptake of malaria services.
It will strengthen the capacity for higher quality service delivery and monitoring and evaluation and provide tools and equipment to PMI-supported health districts in Dosso and Tahoua.
MCD’s specific roles within the PMI AHMS Niger project include:
- Leading malaria diagnostic and case management at the health facility and community levels and activities to improve health worker adherence to national malaria guidelines;
- Supporting the NMCP in developing, reviewing, and updating policy, guidelines, and training materials as well as training community health workers;
- Supporting work to scale up mass drug administration, case management, and surveillance approaches; and
- Providing support to the NMCP for their malaria control program as well as the health information system to provide high-quality data for decision making in a timely manner.
Other areas that will be focused on by others include:
- Strengthening the capacity of malaria prevention and ownership of health at the community and household levels while maintaining gains made at health facility level in focus districts;
- Supporting targeted private for-profit health facilities to improve malaria case management and reporting; and
- Improving technical, managerial, financial, and leadership capacity as well as accountability at different levels of the health care system.
