Child Aid Ehlanzeni (South Africa)
The Project was established in November 2016 to facilitate malaria elimination in Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. The Project targets reducing local malaria cases to zero and facilitating the testing of the mobile migrant populations (MMPs) from the high endemic neighbouring country, Mozambique, because high unemployment promotes movement of high volumes of people, usually entering and leaving the country through illegal border points.
The project is being implemented in the context of the Southern African Malaria Elimination 8 (E8) Initiative, which is a coordinated, multi-country effort to achieve the elimination of malaria in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland, Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The Nkomazi and Bushbuckridge local municipalities are poor rural areas situated in the eastern part of South Africa, which also is one of the hottest parts of the country. This means that the area has many potential breeding sites for the female Anopheles mosquitoes, which transmit the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
During the first six months of 2019, the project tested 33 103 people in local municipalities of Nkomazi and Bushbuckridge treated 545 people diagnosed with malaria. In this period, the project disseminated information on malaria to 17 schools and reached 945 learners.