Assessment of Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria Treatment

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Sponsor: Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria

Location(s): Kenya; Madagascar; Uganda; Tanzania; Ghana; Niger; Nigeria; Cambodia

Description

The Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm) is an innovative financing mechanism that is managed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund). The AMFm aims to increase use of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) by subsidizing prices. Although most malaria-endemic countries have adopted a policy of using ACTs as first-line treatment, household surveys in 18 African countries found that, in 2008, an average of only 3% of children aged less than 5 years with fever were treated with ACTs.1One reason for this low use rate is that 50–75% of patients in Africa and south-east Asia with suspected malaria seek care in the private sector, where ACT retail prices are high. For example, a course of ACT typically costs 6–10 United States dollars (US$), about 10–20 times the cost of older monotherapies such as chloroquine or sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine.