On World Malaria Day 2026, WBFA reflects on a moment of historic possibility and the urgent, unfinished work of turning scientific achievement into lived protection for Nigeria’s most vulnerable.
By Rasheed Yusuf, the WBFA Director of Policy, Advocacy, Innovation, Research & Development | 25 April 2026
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There is a particular kind of frustration that belongs to global health. Not the frustration of having no answers, but of having the answers and watching them fail to reach the people who need them most. Malaria, in 2026, is that frustration at its starkest.
We have two WHO-approved vaccines. We have next-generation insecticide-treated bed nets. We have artemisinin-based treatments that work. We have seasonal chemoprevention now reaching 54 million children. We have the data, the evidence, and in 47 malaria-free countries the proof of concept. And yet, in Nigeria alone, an estimated 27% of global malaria deaths occurred in 2024. Hundreds of thousands of children and pregnant women are dying from a disease we know how to prevent.
This is the spirit behind this year’s World Malaria Day theme: ‘Driven to End Malaria: Now We Can. Now We Must.’ It holds two truths together the genuine and hard-won progress of the past two decades, and the urgent, uncompromising obligation to not let that progress stall.
The progress is real and it is extraordinary
It is worth pausing on what has been achieved. Since 2000, 2.3 billion malaria cases and 14 million deaths have been averted globally. Countries that seemed impossibly burdened two decades ago are now certified malaria-free. The Greater Mekong Subregion despite entrenched drug resistance and complex geopolitics has seen a 90% reduction in malaria cases. In 2024, 84% of bed nets shipped to Africa were the more effective PBO or dual active ingredient variety, up from just 10% in 2019. And the malaria vaccine, a scientific goal that eluded researchers for over a century, is now a reality deployed in 25 African countries.
These gains were not inevitable. They were the product of extraordinary political commitment, scientific persistence, community engagement, and the kind of sustained international financing that, at its best, global health can mobilise. They are worth celebrating and worth fighting to protect.
“For the first time in history, ending malaria within a generation is not aspirational. It is achievable. What remains is the will to close the gap between what is possible and what is delivered.”
But the threats are converging and Nigeria is in the crosshairs
The World Malaria Report 2025 is not a comfortable read. Drug resistance is confirmed in four African countries and spreading. Insecticide resistance in mosquitoes is now widespread in 48 of 53 reporting countries, weakening the protective value of bed nets. An invasive mosquito species, Anopheles stephensi urban-adapted and insecticide-resistant is expanding its range across Africa, threatening cities that have historically had low malaria transmission. And climate change is accelerating all of these threats: shifting transmission zones, extending seasons, and disrupting the fragile health systems on which malaria response depends.
Then there is the financing crisis. Global malaria funding in 2024 was $3.9 billion — less than half of the $9.3 billion WHO target. The $5.4 billion annual shortfall is not an abstraction. It means bed nets not distributed, health workers not trained, medicines not procured, vaccines not deployed. And the contraction of US global health funding — a seismic shift in the architecture of global health financing — has added further pressure to an already dangerously underfunded response.
For Nigeria, the country that bears the world’s highest malaria burden, these converging threats have a specific and urgent meaning. Progress here is both possible and necessary — but it requires a step change in political commitment, domestic financing, and systems investment.
Malaria is a maternal and newborn health emergency — not just an infectious disease
At WBFA, we have always understood malaria through the lens of reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, adolescent, and nutrition health. Malaria in pregnancy is one of the most underreported crises in global maternal health. It causes maternal anaemia raising the risk of haemorrhage and death. It causes preterm birth. It causes low birthweight itself one of the strongest predictors of neonatal mortality and lifelong developmental disadvantage. An estimated 20% of low birthweight in Africa is directly attributable to malaria in pregnancy.
This is the connection that too often gets lost when malaria is framed as an infectious disease issue, managed separately from the RMNCAH+N continuum. A pregnant woman who contracts malaria in her second trimester is not just a malaria case. She is a maternal health emergency with consequences for her newborn that will unfold over years. And the midwife or community health worker who gives her IPTp, ensures she sleeps under a treated net, and connects her to the malaria vaccine programme for her child is not just doing malaria work. She is doing the full work of maternal and newborn health.
Through MamaCare360, WBFA is working to build exactly that integrated model — where malaria prevention is seamlessly embedded in community-based antenatal care, where digital health platforms support CHWs to screen and refer, and where every woman who registers for ANC also receives malaria prevention as a matter of course.
The vaccine is a breakthrough. Access is the unfinished work.
R21/Matrix-M, the second WHO-approved malaria vaccine, has demonstrated up to 78% efficacy against clinical malaria in children aged 5 to 17 months. That is a remarkable number. It is also important to understand what it means and what it does not mean. A 78% efficacy vaccine in a child who can access four doses on schedule, in a facility with a functioning cold chain, attended by a health worker trained to counsel on the vaccine that is a powerful tool. The same vaccine, in a country where the rollout has not reached the child’s state, where cold storage is inconsistent, where health workers have not been trained, and where caregivers have not been reached with demand-generation messages that is a vaccine that exists on paper but not in practice.
Nigeria has begun its malaria vaccine rollout. That is to be acknowledged and commended. But full national scale-up across all 36 states, integrated into the EPI schedule, with cold chain, training, and supply chain support has not yet been achieved. WBFA is calling for a funded, time-bound National Malaria Vaccine Deployment Plan to be published by Q3 2026. Not a pilot. A plan.
What WBFA is calling for on World Malaria Day 2026
Our position is clear, grounded in evidence, and rooted in our experience working with communities, health workers, and policymakers across Nigeria:
– Fully deploy the malaria vaccine across all 36 states and the FCT through the routine EPI schedule — with funded cold chain and health worker training.
– Integrate malaria prevention (IPTp, ITNs, vaccine counselling) into every antenatal care contact as a non-negotiable standard of care.
– Commit domestic counterpart financing for malaria — reducing the dangerous dependence on volatile international donor support.
– Invest in the community health workforce — training, professionalising, and remunerating the CHWs who are the last mile of malaria prevention.
– Embed malaria in Nigeria’s RMNCAH+N monitoring dashboard and climate-health strategy — not siloed, not vertical, but integrated.
Read our World Malaria Day 2026 Position Statement
The ‘Now We Can’ of this World Malaria Day is true. The science is settled. The tools exist. The African-led programmes are delivering. The ‘Now We Must’ is the harder truth — that none of this will matter unless we close the gap between what is possible and what is delivered, in every state, in every community, for every child and every mother.
At WBFA, we are driven by exactly that imperative. We are driven by the mothers who attend MamaCare360 clinics and the midwives who serve them. By the neonates who come too early because their mothers’ pregnancies were complicated by malaria. By the community health workers who walk kilometres to reach households that no facility can. And by the knowledge that we have, right now, everything we need to end this.
Now We Can. Now We Must.