The African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) has warned that a 30% reduction in malaria-control funding could lead to 146 million additional malaria cases in Africa by 2030. The alliance said the same scale of cut could result in nearly 400,000 deaths and $37 billion in gross domestic product losses by that year.
The warning came at a high-level event on sustainable malaria financing held on 25 September 2026 during the 81st United Nations General Assembly. The meeting was organised by Botswana’s President and ALMA Chair, Duma Gideon Boko, with the African Union Commission and the RBM Partnership to End Malaria.
Participants said malaria control had lost momentum amid a significant funding shortfall, extreme weather events, rising resistance to insecticides and medicines, and humanitarian crises. Africa accounts for 94% of malaria cases worldwide and 95% of global malaria deaths, making the continent central to efforts to reverse the trend.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, told the event: “When investment is sustained, malaria recedes. But when funding reduces, malaria intensifies.”
Global estimates for 2024 put malaria cases at 282 million and deaths at 610,000, the highest case count in over two decades. Funding for malaria that year reached $3.9 billion, against the $9.3 billion that the Global Technical Strategy identifies as the minimum needed for that year alone.
Malaria cases have reportedly risen 22.6 per cent since 2015. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic added an estimated 11 million cases and 55,000 deaths to the global tally, according to the figures cited at the event.
Resistance is adding to the pressure on control programmes. Partial resistance to artemisinin, a malaria medicine, has been confirmed or suspected in at least eight African countries. Participants also pointed to growing resistance to insecticides, which are used in malaria prevention measures.
Scientists polled on the outlook for malaria tools overwhelmingly identified funding shortfalls as the main threat to putting existing tools into wider use and scaling them up. They ranked the shortage ahead of climate change and extreme weather events. Almost all of those polled also said constrained funding threatened research, development and approval of future malaria tools.
One expert said: “Funding for global health has always been limited, but the huge scale back of investment in support for this type of research in the last couple of years is almost unprecedented.”
African leaders said recent replenishments for the Global Fund and Gavi had fallen short of their targets. They also said official assistance for healthcare needs in Africa continued to decline.
The leaders urged member states to embed malaria financing in national budgets and development plans. They called for stronger domestic financing and multisectoral action, while maintaining that international support remained necessary for elimination efforts.
Muhammad Jallow, vice president of The Gambia, said: “We must be mindful of the fiscal constraints facing many of our countries. Domestic financing alone cannot sustain the level of investment required to reach elimination”
The ALMA projection sets out the potential consequences of a further funding reduction, though the alliance did not specify the countries where the additional cases could occur, the funding baseline used for the estimate, or how the projected economic losses would be distributed.
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