The AMCEEN (Accelerating Malaria Control and Elimination Efforts in Nigeria) project, funded by the Gates Foundation, supports State Malaria Programmes to implement data-driven, sub-nationally tailored malaria plans by strengthening planning processes, tracking of service delivery, surveillance, and the use of granular data to address malaria heterogeneity across Local Government Areas in Kaduna and Kano States
From January 26 – 29, 2026, the Gates Foundation malaria leadership team engaged national leaders, technical partners, and state malaria programs to review progress, surface bottlenecks, and strengthen alignment with government priorities.
Conversations kick-started in Abuja with the National Malaria Elimination Programme (NMEP), national malaria technical working group, and the AMCEEN consortium (CHAI, Malaria Consortium, and SCIDaR), reflecting on the country’s malaria elimination progress and priorities, update on development of the new National Malaria Strategic Plan (2026-2030), the role of granular data and government systems in subnaitonal tailoring, and current challenges in implementation.
The Gates Foundation malaria leadership team undertook a high-level visit to Kano State, featuring direct engagements with the leadership of Kano and Kaduna States—the two AMCEEN implementing states. The engagement convened other key stakeholders, including Gates Foundation grantees (Society for Family Health, Sproxil, and ACOMIN), the World Health Organisation, the Kano and Kaduna State Bureaus of Statistics, technical partners, and representatives from the private sector, to align on progress, lessons learned, coordination, and priorities for sustaining malaria impact.
Field visits were conducted to selected Primary Health Care facilities (Global Fund–supported and non-supported) as well as a community pharmacy in Kano State. These engagements provided first-hand insights into service delivery practices such as adherence to malaria test-and-treat protocols and the quality of routine data documentation at service delivery points.
Across all engagements, a consistent theme emerged: sub-national tailoring (SNT) requires the use of local granular data, strong state ownership, quality data generation, simple tools, and partners’ effort to ensure prioritisation and optimisation of interventions in light of dwindling resources to aid implementation, especially in complex programmatic settings based on current state realities.
The visit also provided an opportunity to review complementary Gates Foundation–supported investments, most notably with PATH-MACEPA, reinforcing how coordinated partner support strengthens planning and implementation of sub-national tailoring of malaria interventions. Discussions also focused on strengthening the project’s impact, defining minimum viable products, and outlining transition pathways to institutionalize gains and prevent a reversal of progress achieved under the AMCEEN project.
For SCIDaR, supporting governments to continuously turn evidence into action, long after individual projects end, is a core principle of our work. As Nigeria advances its malaria elimination agenda, the conversations and insights from this visit underscore a shared commitment to targeted, data-driven, and government-led solutions, focused where the burden is highest and the gains are most urgent.
