JHPIEGO Receives $1 Million From ExxonMobil For Malaria In Pregnancy Programs In Angola And Nigeria

Main Category: Tropical Diseases
Also Included In: Pregnancy / Obstetrics;  Aid / Disasters;  Women's Health / Gynecology
Article Date: 01 Feb 2007 - 14:00 PDT

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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 HYPERLINK "http://www.who.int" t "_blank" 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.

For more information on JHPIEGO's MIP work click here.

About JHPIEGO

JHPIEGO (pronounced "JA-PIE-GO"), an international health organization affiliated with The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, builds global and local partnerships to enhance the quality of health services for women and families. JHPIEGO's focus is on training and support for health care providers - including doctors, nurses, midwives and health educators - working in limited-resource settings throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean.

JHPIEGO has Centers of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health, HIV/AIDS, and Family Planning and Reproductive Health to strengthen services to women and families in more than 50 countries around the world. www.jhpiego.org

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 www.exxonmobil.com

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