Community engagement key to reducing malaria burden
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership to End Malaria, Dr Michael Adekunle Charles, has said community engagement is critical to reducing malaria burden.
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He noted that the elimination of malaria would start and end in communities and therefore, there was the need to show communities that a difference could be made in bringing down the malaria burden.
SBC WG meeting
Dr Charles was speaking at the annual meeting of the Social and Behaviour Change Working Group (SBC WG) of the RBM Partnership.
The SBC WG annual meeting convenes malaria SBC professionals worldwide to share experiences, participate in skills-building sessions, discuss emerging issues and set the working group’s priorities for the coming year.
The three-day meeting, which took place in Nairobi, was on the theme: Insight to Action. About 130 participants from 30 countries, including Ghana, took part in the meeting.
Strategic action
Touching on the theme of the meeting, Dr Charles called on the participants to turn their strategic insights into strategic actions in terms of how countries could draw on lessons and best practices and disseminate them to the communities.
Work together
Dr Charles said no single entity could bring down the burden of malaria and, therefore, there was the need to work together and collaborate as much as possible.
He noted that malaria continued to intersect with gender, climate and humanitarian crisis and as such it was essential for all to be adaptive and connect with some of those sectors.
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Additionally, he called for a multi-sectoral approach, as well as intersectionality between malaria and youth, malaria and gender, malaria and conflict, and whatever social behaviour changes were needed to be taken around those actions.
Another vision Dr Charles put across was to have a secretariat and partnership that focused on knowledge sharing.
He said knowledge sharing was key because it was well known that it worked well in some areas but might not work in other areas, and so there was no point in reinventing the wheel.
Furthermore, the RBM CEO said there was the need to work together to translate policies into action as well as taking a look at what actions were on the ground and how they could influence policies, adding that “I believe you as the social behaviour change community can help us in terms of feeding into the global and regional discussions in terms of what we are seeing on the ground to influence the next steps”.
Behaviour change
The Deputy Director-General, Health Ministry, Kenya, Dr Hadley Sultani Matendechero, said malaria continued to be a public health concern in Kenya, with approximately 70 per cent of the population at risk of getting malaria, including 13 million people living in areas of moderate to high transmission.
He said to reduce malaria incidence and deaths, the National Malaria Control Programme (NMCP) continued to strategise with effective malaria control and elimination interventions in Kenya due to the heterogeneity of malaria incidence and prevalence in the country.
However, he noted that the deployment of malaria control and elimination interventions could only have the desired impact on the disease if the tools and services met the technical and operational thresholds of uptake and utilisation by the targeted populations and or communities.
That, he said, was a function of appropriate human social behaviour change and resultant positive practices to create favourable norms.
Dr Matendechero gave the assurance that the Kenyan government was committed to supporting efforts to enable widespread positive behaviour change among all populations.
Approach
A co-chair of the SBC WG, Mariam Wamala Nabukenya, said the theme of the meeting reflected the need for practitioners of social behaviour change to move beyond just the data and its analysis to the “practical, scalable solutions”.
“These insights that we will gather are really like the very first step but for us to be able to make a difference, we need to move beyond that and work towards ensuring that the communities are benefiting; that we develop and tailor our messages to community-centred approaches that address the real issues in the communities that can promote the behaviour that we want,” she said.