This week, Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program is being featured on the BBC World Service. Broadcasting in 32 languages around the world, the BBC World Service reached an average weekly listenership of 183 million people in 2007. Project Muso is featured as part of a story on the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a new foundation that is one of the supporters of Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program as a model effort.

Malaria kills one million people each year, most of them children. A child younger than 5 dies from malaria every 42 seconds. The Community Based Malaria Program aims to stop deaths from malaria and strengthen Mali’s primary health care system.

Group Pivot Santé Population recently selected Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program as a model program for its best practices exchange program. GPSP is a nationwide Malian coalition of civil society health organizations. It acts as a pivot-point for nationwide action to fight malaria. Conducting interviews in the field with residents of Yirimadjo, GPSP’s team learned about the impact that Project Muso’s malaria program has already made in its first seven months.

Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program is featured in a recent report, Malaria: Scoping New Partnerships published by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University.

A good way to understand the vision behind Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program is to read the World Health Organization’s 2008 World Health Report, entitled Primary Care: Now More than Ever.

The WHO lays out an ambitious vision for what primary care should be: “Primary care provides a place to which people can bring a wide range of health problems – it is not acceptable that in low-income countries primary care would only deal with a few ‘priority diseases… primary care requires adequate resources and investment, and can then provide much better value for money than its alternatives. It is not acceptable that, in low-income countries, primary care would have to be financed through out-of-pocket payments on the erroneous assumption that it is cheap and the poor should be able to afford it.’”

This is why Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Program must be about more than malaria. True, the program aims to stop malaria deaths in Yirimadjo by providing early and effective treatment. But the scope of the program is deeper, and more ambitious. If we are successful at rolling back malaria, what legacy do we leave behind? What primary health care systems need to be in place to sustain our achievement, to make sure malaria does not reemerge a few years later?  If we do succeed with malaria, how will we take on the other health crises that Malians face?  If the poor are still excluded from care by unjust health care financing policies, will we have succeeded? 

Project Muso recognizes that, to achieve sustained improvements in health, we need to both fight malaria and strengthen primary health care systems.

The beginning of September marked the launch of Project Muso’s Community Based Malaria Treatment Program. More than 400 community members, government partners and program participants gathered outside Yirimadjo’s new clinical care center this September 6 to celebrate the launch.

A new clinical center building, constructed as part of Project Muso's Community Based Malaria Program, opened its doors at the beginning of September. Since then, it has been the center for primary care for Yirimadjo's 26,000 citizens. The new facility was constructed and equipped by Project Muso in collaboration with the Yirimadjo Community Health Association and the Malian Ministry of Health, with support from the Larson Legacy Foundation, the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust, Ed Scott Ventures, and World Vision.