Reimagining malaria: five reasons to strengthen community engagement in the lead up to malaria elimination.

Maxine Whittaker,Catherine Smith

doi:10.1186/s12936-015-0931-9

Maxine Whittaker, Catherine Smith

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12936-015-0931-9

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Abstract

Although community engagement has been recognized as an important element of public health since the Alma Ata declaration, in practice community engagement has played a marginal role within malaria control programmes. As more countries move toward elimination, malaria elimination programmes will need to reimagine malaria in a number of ways. An important element of this will be to re-conceptualize and better strategize community engagement, which will become increasingly important for programme success as countries near elimination. This commentary intends to begin a conversation on re-imagining community engagement in an elimination setting, by outlining five ways that community engagement should be strengthened and re-strategized in the lead up to malaria elimination.

Highlights

As the contributors to this thematic series point out, there are a number of ways in which malaria should be reimagined in the lead up to elimination
Community engagement has long been recognized as a factor contributing to the successful control and elimination of many infectious diseases, including malaria, in reality community engagement has often played a marginal role within malaria control and elimination programmes in the last 15 years
While the concept of community participation was widely accepted during the control era and was noted as a key element of Primary Health Care in the Alma Ata declaration of 1978, some have noted that malaria programmes did not fully utilize the benefits of community engagement [10, 11] especially as the pendulum swung in the MDGs period towards top-down approaches to malaria in many settings

Summary

Introduction

As the contributors to this thematic series point out, there are a number of ways in which malaria should be reimagined in the lead up to elimination. This commentary suggests that while community engagement is rarely recognized as an important element of malaria elimination, that in practice a large number of activities are already implemented at the community level that depend on support from communities for success.

Results

Conclusion