Ken Muchira, Hemalatha Sabbineni, John Moses Bollarapu and Kamrul Hasan, Grand Valley State University, USA

Malaria is a life-threatening mosquito-borne infectious disease, mainly caused by the plasmodium parasites. African continent still suffers the most from this disease for many reasons such as poverty, lack of awareness, lack of investments, insufficient infrastructure and precaution measures, weak policy as well as management, and improper diagnosis practices. In this research, we have performed extensive malaria data analysis for several African countries for the period 2000- 2020, and were able to extract some key insights for actionable insights. Our analysis shows that, overall, the continent has reduced the malaria infection rate from 37% to 25% (and associated death rates from 0.15% to 0.05%) in the last twenty years - a big achievement indeed. Unfortunately, some countries couldn’t follow this trend, leading the progress and the development curve to be stalled or constant and sometimes even negative for the last few years. These rates are still higher when we compare them to other parts of the world. We were also able to make some concrete associations with finances, associated investments, and the malaria diagnostics methodologies, adopted and practiced by certain countries. The overall healthcare spending (as a share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)) in Africa is way below the global healthcare spending as reported (5.6% vs 8.5%) in 2000 and (5.18% vs 9.8%) in 2019 by the World Health Organization (WHO). More alarming is, due to healthcare cuts, in recent years many countries switched from the more orthodox and effective microscopy diagnostics tests to comparatively cheaper and less effective Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs) leading to severe consequences. We have made some concrete recommendations to combat malaria and to reduce infection and associated mortality rates.

Malaria, Anopheles Mosquitoes, Africa, World Health Organization (WHO), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Microscopy Tests, Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs).