Seasonal malaria chemoprevention with Malaria Consortium

In much of the Sahel, malaria is not a year-round problem. Transmission concentrates into a rainy season of three or four months, and almost all of the childhood deaths fall inside that window. Seasonal malaria chemoprevention exploits that pattern: rather than treating illness after it appears, it gives children a preventive course of medicine each month while the risk is high.

Children aged three to 59 months receive up to four monthly doses of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine plus amodiaquine, delivered door to door by community health workers. Around the delivery itself sits a great deal of logistics: training and paying those workers, moving drugs through the supply chain and keeping them secure, community mobilization so families expect the visit, safety monitoring, and data capture that lets the next round be checked.

The World Health Organization recommends the approach for areas with highly seasonal transmission. The charity delivering it here is Malaria Consortium.

The intervention has been shown to prevent a large share of malaria cases among the children who receive it, at a cost of a few dollars per child protected for a season. Tens of millions of children are eligible across the Sahel and a substantial share still go without, so this is a program with an unusually clear answer to the question of what another dollar would do.

Gifts through Rethink Charity come with an official Canadian donation receipt. Because delivery is seasonal but funding commitments are made well in advance, monthly giving is genuinely useful here. You can also support this program alongside bed net distribution through the Global Health Fund.