Roll Back Malaria has achieved a high profile but little real action

Three years have passed since the launch of Roll Back Malaria, the global campaign to halve the burden of malaria by 2010, and one year since its high profile African summit in Abuja.1 The campaign has had two major successes. Firstly, it has built an impressive partnership of the United Nations and development agencies, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, governments, the private sector, researchers, and non-governmental organisations. Secondly, it has raised the visibility of this neglected disease—one that causes at least 3000 deaths a day and that slows economic growth by 1.3% per year in endemic areas.1 But it has not yet produced a major impact where it matters most—at the ground level in the world's poorest countries.

Participants from these countries therefore showed understandable impatience at the campaign's fourth global partners meeting, hosted last month by the World Bank in Washington DC. Many complained that things were moving far too slowly. The partnership's credibility, they told the BMJ, now rests on its ability to translate its promises and pledges into malaria control programmes …