How Tanzania is financing its fight against malaria
What you need to know:
By Leodegar Tenga
If you are reading this in Tanzania, malaria has almost certainly touched your life. A child who missed a week of school. A relative rushed to a health facility in the middle of the night. Or, more devastating, a funeral that should never have happened. We want to share how Tanzania is paying for that fight, and why we believe the coalition behind it is one of the most important stories in African malaria control.
If we can end malaria in Tanzania, the prize is an economy that stops losing shillings, hours, and lives to a preventable disease. That requires a financing model reaching beyond the national budget into the private sector, faith communities, civil society, and the institutions that form the backbone of public life.
Government cannot close the gap alone. Building a coalition around Government is the reason the End Malaria Council Tanzania (EMCT) exists. Three recent examples show what that coalition is producing.
First, private capital channelled into Government delivery systems. Through EMCT, SC Johnson committed $750,000 (close to Sh1.9 billion) to Tanzania’s malaria fight. $250,000 has built dispensaries in two hard-to-reach districts.
The remaining $500,000 is now supporting nationwide capacity building in Larval Source Management. Private investment routed through the national programme strengthens systems that will outlast any single grant.
Second, faith-led contribution at community level. At the EMCT quarterly meeting in December 2024, the national malaria scorecard identified Chunya District in Mbeya Region as a high-burden area.
Four months later, a two-day faith-led initiative trained more than 100 community malaria ambassadors there, backed by the regional and district commissioners.
The operation was mounted almost entirely on in-kind contributions: larvicide from Kibaha Biolarvicide Factory, a venue from the Catholic Church in Lupatingatinga, and support from regional private sector and the community itself. Training that could have cost millions of shillings was delivered on almost none.
Third, Government backing this coalition with its own resources, with local manufacturing making that investment go further.
Tanzania is now producing two of the malaria tools that matter most. At AtoZ Textile Mills in Arusha, insecticide-treated nets are manufactured on Tanzanian soil, creating jobs and retaining foreign exchange.
At Kibaha, our biolarvicide is now a Tanzanian product progressing toward WHO pre-qualification.
Together they cover both ends of the vector control chain: bednets protect families at the point of contact, and biolarvicide reaches the mosquito before it leaves the water.
Government has been allocating substantial resources to procurement and deployment of these tools, and the Prime Minister’s Office is championing a Multi-Sectoral Malaria Framework that requires every Sector Ministry to prioritise and implement malaria-smart actions through its own resources.
None of this would be possible without the governance architecture established by Her Excellency President Dr Samia Suluhu Hassan, whose vision gave rise to the EMCT.
Her decision to establish the Council with a Chair from the private sector and the substantive Minister of Health as Co-Chair was deliberate, because malaria elimination demands both the convening reach of Government and the mobilisation capacity of every other sector.
This is the wider approach we are asking every sector of Tanzanian society to take. Public institutions, private companies, faith communities, and civil society organisations all have resources at their disposal: employees, clients, members, premises, and channels of communication.
Artists are already showing what this looks like in practice, using social media platforms to amplify the Zero Malaria Starts With Me campaign.
The National Bank of Commerce has contributed Sh10 million to the malaria fight and hosts EMCT’s accounts pro bono. We ask every sector to apply what it already has to the malaria fight, in coordination with national strategy.
To our international partners, and to companies at home and abroad: this work is happening even as aid budgets contract and African health programmes come under pressure.
Tanzania is demonstrating one way an African country can finance its own path to elimination, by mobilising the full capacity of its society alongside the resources of its Government.
We welcome partners ready to build on what Tanzanians have already started.
Commitment is the starting line. The distance that matters is everything that follows, and we are asking you to run it with us.
