World Malaria Day

Every year, malaria kills some 600,000 people around the world, the vast majority of them children. It also affects French people living in Overseas France and abroad, or travelling in exposed areas.

Yet the fight against the disease is becoming complicated: climate disruption is extending the areas of transmission, conflicts are destabilizing health systems in the long term, and resistance to both treatment and insecticides is rising. 

In the face of these challenges, France is fully mobilized. It remains one of the main contributors to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, thanks to which malaria-linked deaths fell by 30% between 2002 and 2023.

France is taking action on the ground. Through L’Initiative, a French facility that complements the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and accelerates the fight against major pandemics, France is strengthening health systems. In the Amhara region of Ethiopia, the Sennay project has enabled 25,000 seasonal workers to receive anti-malaria treatment and 36,000 people to benefit from a diagnostic test since July 2023.

With Unitaid, France is also supporting the rollout of malaria chemoprevention – a treatment from which nearly 53 million children now benefit, and which saves the lives of over 100,000 children every year – and the development of circuits to distribute treatments for pregnant women.

Finally, with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, France is helping to roll out the first vaccines against malaria. Twenty-five countries on the African continent have already included them in their vaccination programmes, with tens of millions of doses administered, a major step forward in protecting children from this scourge.