Access Bank, Health Alliance tackle Malaria

In a bid to eliminate Malaria in Nigeria, foremost financial institution with a strong bias for excellent services delivery, Access Bank, under the leadership of its CEO- Mr. Herbert Wigwe and Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria has championed an innovative financing platform that seeks to galvanize private sector resources and capabilities for sustained support towards averting at least 1 million malaria cases and deaths by 2020–a first step towards complementing government’s effort in achieving its malaria pre-elimination goals by 2020, tagged “Malaria-To-Zero’ Initiative.

This platform will integrate existing and new initiatives on eradicating malaria, and thus build synergies that produce impact far greater than what could be attained with fragmented efforts.

Based on statistics, Sub-Saharan Africa bears a disproportionately high share of the global disease burden, accounting for 88% of cases and 90% of deaths in 2015. In Africa today, malaria accounts for one fifth of all child deaths.

Besides the unquantifiable loss of human lives, the disease costs the African continent $12 billion annually in productivity losses. Malaria represents one of the biggest public health and developmental challenges in Nigeria.

According to 2015 estimates, Nigeria had over 100 million malaria cases and about 300,000 malaria deaths, representing the highest number of malaria casualties worldwide.

CEO of private sector health alliance of Nigeria, PHN Dr Muntaqa Sadiq also stated that ‘the currency in the health sector is the number of lives saved and the goal of malaria to Zero is to save 1,000,000 lives from malaria death’. PHN has also acknowledged that accelerating progress towards pre-elimination requires rethinking the way malaria interventions are developed, executed and financed, from a public, fragmented, tactical approach to an innovative public-private bespoke approach.

The CEO of Access Bank Dr Herbert Wigwe reaffirmed the commitment of the bank to fight malaria in Nigeria by stating that ‘malaria kills business productivity and denies children access to education, we are strongly committed to malaria to Zero so as to continuously strengthen a conducive platform aimed at supporting the National Malaria Elimination Strategy’.

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