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

Résumé détaillé

Tackling malaria must be a ‘non-negotiable’ in national budgets, even in the age of aid cuts, Joy Phumaphi writes

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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…

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