ACOMIN advocates increased support for malaria elimination in Taraba
By Terna Chikpa, Jalingo
Civil Society for Malaria Control, Immunisation and Nutrition (ACOMIN), on Friday called on donor agencies to increase their support for community-centred initiatives for possible elimination of malaria in Taraba and Nigeria at large.
This according to Mohammed Tanko Danburam, the ACOMIN state Coordinator, explained that the idea was to contribute to Nigeria’s goal of eliminating malaria through community mobilisation and sensitisation against malaria.
The coordinator while speaking at a media briefing in Jalingo said, Nigeria needed to explore more ways to achieve control of malaria due to certain challenges confronting malaria intervention.
“Nigeria still have a long way to go to achieve control of malaria due to certain challenges confronting malaria intervention.
“The increased difficulty in accessing hard-to-reach communities due to insecurity ravaging many parts of the country and drug resistance by the malaria parasite is the reason why ACOMIN has introduce the community-centred initiatives- such as the Community-led Monitoring project to approach the fight against malaria in such challenging areas.
“The initiative being implemented so far has brought many advantages such as, increased ingenuity, flexibility in identifying and addressing the root cause of failed interventions and enhanced accountability among others.
“The community-centred initiative being implemented by ACOMIN has yielded positive results and we are calling on all government ministries and agencies to include or scale-up community-centre initiatives in their programs and the donors to increase their support for community-centre initiatives to help achieve the elimination malaria in Taraba and Nigeria at large.
“As part of national effort to address the challenges of Malaria in Nigeria, ACOMIN has been re-engaged by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) under the ongoing Global Fund (GF) Malaria Grant to continue implementing, and the civil society component has successfully done this from 2019 to 2020. The grant is presently being implemented in the thirteen (13) GF supported states of Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Jigawa, Kwara, Niger, Taraba, Gombe, Yobe, Adamawa, Ogun, Osun and Delta States and the project covers 8 LGAs in each state.
“In Taraba, the selected LGAs are, Yorro, Lau, Gassol, Bali, Kurmi, Takum, Donga and Ibi LGAs, and we have achieved progress to ensure elimination of malaria in the state and we are calling for increase support to enable us achieve total elimination of malaria,” the coordinator advocated.
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