ACAM Projects & Activities

The Zanzibar Anti-Malaria Network (ZAMANET) conducted its first ACAM-directed Leadership training in a two-day Workshop for its members on November 25-26, 2006. This meeting followed the Annual meeting of EARN, the East Africa Regional Network of national malaria programs in the Region, that brought together more than 20 NGOs from across Zanzibar island, including Pemba. The Workshop was conducted by Dr. Larry Casazza, director and founder of ACAM-African Communities Against Malaria. This training was sponsored by the Zanzibar Malaria Control Program (ZMCP).

The training was based on principles drawn from an important resource used extensively by the private corporate sector, namely, Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline”. It promotes the concept of creating a Learning Organization to bring about fundamental change toward achieving a Shared Vision. The premise for change is a learning process approach where innovation is encouraged and results measured at the operational level.

In the initial session, the group came to the consensus that its Shared Vision is: “A Malaria-Free Zanzibar”. Next, after careful analysis of the health system, the group agreed that the principal producer of health is the household and the communities themselves; these must be actively engaged in the ZMCP program as an effective voice and participant in the national program if Zanzibar is to eliminate malaria and sustain the results.

Dr. Casazza expressed his optimism with the steps taken in Zanzibar to control malaria and urged the participants to use their new Leadership skills as a means to achieve the goal of the Shared Vision in their communities. He added that malaria can be conquered as long as there are concrete unified steps taken by all the stakeholders, including: government, NGOs, international institutions and donors, and  most importantly, by the community at large – reaching down to the actual households themselves. All are key partners in the Learning Organization that can serve to be a powerful tool to move from the current reality toward the desired future.

Finally, the training was also attended by Ms. Beatrice Minja, chairperson for TaNAAM, an NGO collaborative organization on the Mainland that has advised ZAMANET  from its earliest organizational steps. She urged the participants to emulate TaNAAM’s success story and promised to remain close to ZAMANET as it grows and evolves.

July 2-17, 2006

ACAM Makes Observation Visit to Angola’s Viva a Vida Campanha com Saude

Malaria is a major public health problem in Angola and is a principal cause of morbidity and mortality. Malaria accounts for 35% of the overall mortality in children, 25% of overall maternal mortality and is the cause of 60% of hospital admissions for children under five and 10% for pregnant women.

Currently only 3.6% of the national gross domestic product and 4.1% of the Government of Angola’s budget is spent on health, but with the end of war, government pledges of financial support for health are expected to increase.

Starting in 2006, the Government of Angola has made major strides in its efforts to provide quality services, effective preventive and control interventions, together with organizational support for sustainable national malaria programming. In all the baseline planning for the national Measles-Malaria Initiative (Vida a Viva Campanha), they have displayed strong leadership commitment to its outcome, and have successfully engaged multinational donors, private corporate sector, NGOs and CBOs as partners in this effort.

Results from the Vida a Viva Campaign highlight the effectiveness of the collaboration across the various partners supporting the campaign. These include the delivery of: 2.9 million polio vaccinations; 2.2 million doses of Vitamin A; 2 million doses of Albendazol (de-worming medication); and 2.2 million doses of Measles vaccine. Specific to Malaria prevention, seven of the 18 provinces were identified as high-priority and included Insecticide-treated bednet (ITN) distribution in the program. Approximately 600,000 bednets were distributed, reaching 93% of the targeted population for the seven provinces.

The challenge now is: “How to keep up the momentum and maintain the networking that “closed the gap” with  the households in the communities?” Truly, this is an amazing example of efficient, effective social mobilization that brought “ownership” of the efforts to those who need the services at the grassroots. But the campaign’s success hopefully will be viewed as only the beginning, not the end of an effective, but somewhat separate health event.

Lastly, ACAM presented three specific recommendations for maintaining and nurturing this collaborative network and filling the gap for Malaria prevention and control. They are:

  • First, the Ministry of Health should codify this network at all levels and establish regular, on-going venues for collaboration. This network can be leveraged for a variety of ongoing health issues from national to local levels, for example, use in the recent cholera outbreak. Over time, this network will become a natural infrastructure of resources that can easily be deployed and leveraged for a variety of health initiatives.
  • Second, engage in the development of leadership at all levels. Investing in the development of leadership at provincial and local levels will build long-term capacity to empower communities to take ownership of their health. In ACAM’s experience, Peter Senge’s work in this area is a powerful and relevant tool. This type of leadership development will further result in a common language and set of practices that will mature over time, building a lasting excellence in public health, well beyond a single event or initiative.
  • Lastly, it is important that bednets are distributed to the remaining eleven provinces not reached in the campaign. This distribution effort can be a test of the ability of this new, fragile network to continue working together on a common set of goals. Building funding, delivery, and social mobilization plans and timeline are critical.

Building upon its recent successes, Angola is well poised to become a strong model for other African countries to dramatically reverse the burden of disease due to malaria in the near future.

September 20, 2005

The Impact of Malaria on Health in Africa and its Interaction with HIV/AIDS: The Potential for NGOs to strengthen Civil Society for Sustainable Results

CDN Webcast Presentation

This presentation is a compilation of information that acknowledges the contribution of CDC, USAID, the CORE Group and the Advisory Board of ACAM. I thank you

July 25, 2005

“ACAM contributes community/household perspective to Presidential Initiative Against Malaria”

How to get off a Dead Horse

Most recently, ACAM has been working closer to “home”, namely, with the House and Senate staff teams working on the language for the new legislation of the Presidential Initiative against Malaria. Ironically, the experience we have seen in our national efforts to respond to the Hurricanes hitting the Gulf coast has opened the discussion to considerations of the value of local resources to be fully engaged in any major national agenda.

Senator Brownback has lead the efforts in the Senate for the US$1.2 billion Presidential Initiative against Malaria.(PMI). But the legislative language for the implementation of these funds needs to specifically recognize the involvement of NGOs already working at the community level. This will call for new coordination among global, Regional and national players to be certain that the results envisioned in the measurable objectives are valid, informative and lead to improved management practices starting at the community level.

ACAM shared a PowerPoint presentation with both with the Senator’s staff together with National Security Council (NSC) staff and the House side, who are involved in the efforts. The Dead Horse analogy comes from a course developed by Henry Mosley and Ben Lozare at Johns Hopkins, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. The course material, taken from Peter Senge’s, “The Fifth Discipline”,(a methodology used by Fortune 500 companies for over the past decade) and speaks to  the many faulty attempts to re-dress a problem that is not responding to the current efforts. Some of them are:

  • buy a stronger whip
  • change performance criteria for the horse
  • increase funding
  • site visits to see how others ride a dead horse
  • change riders.
  • hire a consultant to show you how to ride a dead horse.

While this may be humorous, it does carry a truth as well.

March 2005

Nurturing RBM Secretariats

Coupling Technical Expertise with Management and  Implementation Capability


ACAM Achievements in 2004

In 2004, ACAM’s second year of operations and its first year of operations under the ACAM designation as a contract recipient, the number of contracts and contractors increased significantly. For the first time, ACAM became more involved with relief efforts related to malaria. A brief summary of these consultancies are as follows:

  • AED for follow-up on a earlier Child Survival consultancy in Nigeria
  • GlaxoSmithKline for fellowship to INTRAC Oxford, England to study Organizational Development fo NGOs
  • CORE Group for Fresh Air Malaria Workshop in Accra, Ghana
  • Vestergaard-Frandsen to attend DIHAD 2004 in Dubai for Abstract presentation
  • One World consultancy for Enteric Vaccine meeting at Airlie House, Virginia
  • CORE Group for Fresh Air malaria workshop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
  • CORE for Fresh Air workshop in Bo, Sierra Leone
  • MENTOR for consultancy in Monrovia, Liberia for transition from relief to development
  • CORE Group for representation to AFRO region IMCI-RBM annual joint meeting in Maputo, Mozambique
  • CORE Group for Fresh Air workshop in Nairobi, Kenya and follow-up on collaboration with Vestergaard-Frandsen in Kisii District, Kenya
  • CORE Group for representation at strategic Child Survival meeting in Phnom Phen, Cambodia.

In addition, there were opportunities for participation in CORE’s Malaria Working Group tasks. As result of these multiple consultancies, ACAM was able to show its first financially solvent year in 2004.

ACAM with NAIMA+ NGOs successfully hosts Collaborative Malaria Workshop with MISAU, Donors and Private Sector Partners

Malaria threatens almost half of humanity, annually infecting up to 500 million people and claiming an estimated 3 million lives. Sub-Saharan Africa is hardest hit by the disease; here, malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. Mozambique is among the ten nations most affected by malaria. Stable transmission rates make malaria Mozambique’s primary cause of morbidity and mortality, resulting in an estimated 44,000-67,000 malaria-specific deaths per year across all age groups. It accounts for 40% of all outpatient consultations, 60% of pediatric in-patients and a third of all hospital deaths.

At the Kaya-Kwanga Hotel in Maputo, representatives from government, multilateral agencies, and the nongovernmental and private sectors met to discuss recent developments in malarial prevention and treatment interventions and national policy, in addition to formulating “next steps” to defeat the disease through improved collaboration. The meeting took place on Friday, April 15, 2005 with thirty-four participants from twenty-seven organizations attending the all-day event.

The Workshop was sponsored by ACAM (African Communities Against Malaria), an NGO seeking to strengthen NGO collaboration for malaria at African national levels in collaboration with NAIMA+, a collaborative group of international NGOs working primarily in HIV/AIDS. MISAU and international partners of NAIMA+ contributed to the agenda as did WHO, UNICEF, USAID, JICA and LDSI. GlaxoSmith Kline, Syngenta and Pro-serve provided logistical support as well.

The goal was to mobilize NGO participation and contributions to confront malaria in Mozambique in collaboration with other public and private actors committed to reducing the incidence and impact of malaria. The workshop emphasized the role non-governmental organizations can play in assisting the Ministry of Health to implement Mozambique’s National Malaria Strategy. Participants also had an opportunity to meet with representatives of private sector companies who make or market anti-malarial products, in addition to MISAU representatives of the National Malaria Control Program and major technical assistance organizations working for malaria control in Mozambique

The session was opened by Bishop Sengulane of the Anglican Church who challenged the participants to move toward elimination of malaria as a major killer of children and adults in this country. The key learning objectives were set forth were:

  • To be informed concerning the state-of-the art information of the Roll Back Malaria Initiative in Mozambique focusing on the burden of disease on the health system, communities and households,
  • To study the national malaria country strategy, including drug policies for case management of children, insecticide treated materials and vector control, and treatment for pregnant women,
  • To learn about the clinical interaction between malaria and HIV/AIDS infections,
  • To exchange information with MISAU and major donors concerning the range of NGO program activities to address malaria,
  • Finally, to identify potential partners with whom their organizations can work and engaged in initial discussions with them about potential collaboration.

Dr. Francisco Saute, MISAU NMCP director, provided an in-depth summary of the national malaria program and policies and engaged in a lively question and answer session with the participants. This was followed by presentations from representatives of WHO, UNICEF, USAID, JICA, and LDSI who outlined their respective support to the national efforts with emphasis on the role of NGOs. This was followed by several NGOs, namely, World Vision, World Relief, CUAMM, HAI, and PSI who presented summaries of their field programs with lessons learned from their years of experience.

Finally, Dr. Larry Casazza, ACAM director, summarized the state of the art information regarding the clinical interaction between malaria and HIV/AIDS. This meeting concluded with the need to strive to integrate programming for these two diseases because of their strong clinical inter-relatedness.

Finally, the participants from MISAU, the NGOs, and technical and financial donors finished the day in a small group exercise identifying specific next steps to be taken to strengthen the collaboration with MISAU in Roll Back Malaria efforts in Mozambique. The meeting was closed by Dr.Saute, MISAU NMCP director, who expressed his appreciation for the open sharing and obvious willingness on the part on NGOs to scale up Malaria programs in the country.

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