Jhpiego receives $1 million from ExxonMobil for malaria in pregnancy programs in Angola and Nigeria
17 January 2007
Baltimore, Maryland—Jhpiego, an international
health affiliate of The Johns Hopkins University, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the
ExxonMobil Foundation to improve health services in malaria in pregnancy (MIP) in
Angola and Nigeria.
Each year, 30 million pregnancies are threatened by malaria in endemic countries
throughout Africa. Of these, one of the hardest hit is Nigeria, where the disease accounts
for 11 percent of maternal mortality and 12 to 30 percent of mortality in children under
five years of age. In Angola, malaria accounts for 25 percent of maternal mortality and
35 percent of child mortality.
Despite the tragedy and economic loss reflected by these percentages, many
pregnant women in such countries do not have access to the simple technologies that exist to
prevent and control malaria, including: intermittent preventive treatment, the drug regimen recommended
for protecting women and their unborn babies from the effects of malaria; insecticide-treated
bednets, which work by forming a protective barrier between mosquitoes and women while they
sleep; and effective case management.
This new project is a follow-on to a five-country MIP program needs assessment
that Jhpiego conducted for ExxonMobil in 2006. The purpose of the assessment was to identify
a country-specific "roadmap" of future actions—in key areas such as policy, commodities,
training, supervision and community awareness of MIP—for the advancement of effective
MIP programming.
"Jhpiego has been working to lower malaria mortality rates in pregnant women for
more than six years in a total of 24 African countries, and with the support of companies like
ExxonMobil our services continue to grow. We look forward to collaborating with ExxonMobil
and we are thankful to them and all our partners for helping us to improve the health of
women and newborns," said Dr. Leslie Mancuso, President and CEO of Jhpiego.
Jhpiego works in close collaboration with the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership,
which was launched in 1998 by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations
Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank
to provide a coordinated global approach to fighting malaria. The RBM Partnership's goal
is to halve the global burden of malaria by the year 2010.
About Jhpiego
For nearly 40 years, Jhpiego, (pronounced "ja-pie-go"), has empowered front-line health
workers by designing and implementing simple, low-cost, hands-on solutions that
strengthen the delivery of health care services, following the
household-to-hospital continuum of care. We partner with community- to
national-level organizations to build sustainable, local capacity through
advocacy, policy and guidelines development, and quality and performance
improvement approaches.
About ExxonMobil
ExxonMobil is the largest
non-pharmaceutical corporate donor to malaria research and development efforts and the
largest corporate donor to the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI). Since 2000, ExxonMobil
has donated nearly $100 million in community and social development programs, including
grants to organizations working in Africa through the Africa Health Initiative.
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