Nearly half of all deaths and about a third of disabilities in low and middle-income countries could be avoided if people had access to emergency care. In Africa the main causes of emergencies are road accidents, obstetric complications, severe illnesses and non-communicable diseases. Over the past 18 years the African Federation for Emergency Medicine, an advocacy group, […]

Quality data is vital to design better malaria control programmes. This project helps various African countries gather epidemiological evidence to better control malaria. Professor Bob Snow shows how sub-regional, evidence-based platforms can effectively change malaria treatment policies. Bob Snow: The future of malaria control in Africa has to be anchored in quality data, quality assured […]

Interview of Professor Bob Snow, who tells us about his paper published in Nature in October 2017. Read the publication: The prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum in sub-Saharan Africa since 1900 VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: 115 YEARS OF MALARIA IN AFRICA My name is Professor Bob Snow, I work for the Kenya Medical Research Institute Wellcome Trust Programme in […]

The value and potential of geographic information system – or GIS, “the science of where” – has become even more obvious this year as the world responds to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has been used to map the spread of COVID-19 across space and over time, identify hotspots, vulnerable […]

The number of children who die before reaching their fifth birthday is closely monitored as a marker of social well-being and national development. It best summarises the social, economic, environmental and health care systems that children are born into and thus used as the basis of planning health strategies, programmes and interventions. It’s also an important […]

Although the map of malaria in Africa has seen little reduction since 1970, the likelihood of getting infected has never been so low. For further progress, we need better tools – insecticides, drugs and vaccines – as well as economic development and investments in health systems. Cartography of the disease helps design interventions, and a […]

Improvements in child survival globally have been remarkable. Deaths of children under five declined by 59% from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 38 in 2019. However, 5.2 million child deaths still occurred in 2019. Over half of these were in sub-Saharan Africa. And all five countries with child mortality rates above 100 deaths […]

In a recent open letter to international funders for research and development, we highlighted multiple power imbalances and appealed to the funders to help build a more equitable ecosystem. In this second letter, we urgently call on our own African political and research leaders to take greater responsibility to streamline research programmes and funding. We emphasise that […]