Affordable Malaria Medicine in Nigeria

Here's a heartening article about a coalition that has just completed negotiations which will permit antimalarial medication to be sold in five Nigerian states (together containing about one-fifth of the population) for as little as N60.00 per dose (that's about 27 cents). Previously, Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies had sold for anywhere between N800.00 and N2000.00. The Partnership for Transforming Health Systems, PATHS2, is a program of the United Kingdom Department for International Development. The initiative is a collaboration of PATHS2 with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Nigeria's Federal Ministry of Health, and some pharmaceutical manufacturing firms, working through the Affordable Medicines Facility for malaria (AMFm) initiative. More details on the funding mechanism are here. Malaria accounts for 70% of all disease incidence in Nigeria; in 2008 there were 57,506,430 reported cases, of which 225,424 were fatal.

Misuse of Aid Funds in Nigeria?

Oh dear. This article reports allegations that a half-dozen different Nigerian organizations which received aid from The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria either misused, stole or lost track of millions of aid dollars. The news article seems to be based on a leaked audit report from the Fund's own Office of Inspector General. Officials from the various accused organizations are crying foul, claiming that the Fund's accounting rules have changed, making some of the Fund's demands for retrospective accounting on early grants impossible to fulfill; and that the Fund's audit is an exercise in overreaching and is actually an opening play in a negotiation rather than a conclusive finding. The report adds that some of the audited organizations have already returned some or all of the un-accounted-for money. The opacity of the report, and perhaps of the underlying grantmaking/audit process, makes it difficult to determine which of the reported problems are serious and which aren't; but it all amounts to an object-lesson in the difficulty of managing global health aid.