President Uhuru Kenyatta has urged the global community to remain focused in the fight against malaria despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

The President, who is also the current chairman of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), said it was unfortunate that Covid-19 had overshadowed all the efforts that had gone into fighting malaria.

“As a result, we have tended to forget that pandemics such as malaria are greatest killers today in the African continent than Covid,” he said.

He added: “Let us get our partners to understand that it is in the interest of everybody that we keep our eye on the ball.

The fight against malaria, TB and HIV/Aids –  are all critical, that will ensure that we are better placed not only to fight the current pandemics but also help us prepare against future pandemics.”

Critical priority

Uhuru spoke at State House, Nairobi in a virtual address to the End Malaria Council (EMC); a group of global public sector and business leaders that see malaria eradication as a critical health and development priority.

The President emphasized the need to focus on ALMA’s four-point agenda; top among them being enhancing digitisation and use of real-time data including sharing country malaria scorecards, which can also be used to support the fight against current and future pandemics.

“In fact, we did launch our own ALMA Scorecard Hub and this is part of our agenda during our two-year term.

This real-time data gives us greater transparency, accountability, and also evidence-based decision-making,” he said. 

He noted that the scorecard hub has been used by countries to publish their scorecards, with 10 countries including Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana already sharing their scorecards through the online platform.

“Many others are documenting best practices not only to fight malaria, but also to establish ground rules for fighting future pandemics as well.

I would like to urge ownership of this kind of scorecards by individual countries,” Uhuru said.

The President informed the meeting that ALMA has engaged Regional Economic Communities (RECs) at the Heads of State and Government level to address key challenges and provide solutions in the fight against malaria. 

“And we are asking them to mainstream malaria into the regular agenda of the individual RECs, because you cannot combat this disease in one country and forget that through our porous borders, the problem is never contained” the President said.