Paved by Women: Accelerating a Pathway to Eradicating Malaria
For just over a year, Kati Collective has been working closely with Malaria No More to explore the urgent and differentiated impacts of malaria on the rights of girls, adolescents, and women. We were looking to see if there were particular needs or barriers that influenced the ability of women and girls to access malaria prevention and treatment and, if so, what were the broader impacts of those barriers?
There are 229 million cases of malaria annually and the world has made tremendous progress towards eradication, saving 7.6M lives since 2000.
We already knew that malaria disproportionately affects pregnant women and children, but what we found in this study was that malaria has a significant adverse “ripple effect” on women and girls across their lifecycle.
Applying a gender lens to malaria interventions and investments offers the possibility of accelerating efforts to eradicate the disease as well as the opportunity to take on the long-standing gendered inequities.
“We can get rid of malaria, but we’re going to need focused efforts, new approaches, and investment to do it,” says Michal Fishman, Managing Director, Global Strategic Communications at Malaria No More and our partner on this project.
Bringing partners together to find solutions is a tenet of both Malaria No More (MNM) and Kati Collective. Kati is working with MNM, UN Women, and the RBM Partnership to End Malaria to convene a series of workshops comprised of passionate and informed participants from the gender equity, malaria, and global health communities to generate new, cross-sector ideas and solutions.
These sessions are not public events, but rather a small invited cohort of senior and mid-level experts and civil society members with varied regional expertise who are excited to explore new avenues and brainstorm solutions, including a road map for action.
“We were very intentional about bringing together a diverse and engaged mix of participants,” says Fishman. “We wanted to focus on identifying solutions and building support for action to address the many intersections between malaria and gender.”
Over the next two months, on behalf of the convening partners, we are co-leading host four Action Workshops followed by a Leadership Workshop for leaders of malaria, global health, and gender/women’s rights organizations to debrief key insights and findings and to build momentum for emerging promising investments.
The goal is to create a new constellation of partnerships, identify initial investment opportunities, and build a strong case for advocacy and investment. We also intend to further the conversation for increased women’s leadership within the malaria community. Women make up 70 percent of community healthcare workers globally, many of whom are critical on the frontlines of the malaria fight. We want to catalyze action around creating more avenues to ensure we have more women – across disciplines and at every level – leading the fight.
“We have to develop an investment case that shows all the ways in which addressing malaria with a gender lens benefits women and girls, their communities, and their countries,” says Fishman. She points out that the U.S. government contributes one-third of global funding to fight malaria and that our job is to ensure that policymakers continue to see the tremendous value of the U.S.’ investment in the fight.
“Malaria has similar health and economic effects to Covid,” she says. “With the impact of Covid, we can now appreciate what happens – to a family, the health system, and the economy – when a debilitating and deadly disease is running rampant in a country.”
A public announcement of the outcomes of these action workshops and a cross-sector partnership on gender and malaria is planned for Spring.
You can read more about this work by reading the full learning paper Gender: A Critical Missing Lens in the Malaria Fight on the Malaria No More website.
Graphic created by Jenny Soderbergh.