Measuring Malaria Advocacy Outcomes

The Voices for a Malaria Free Future Project, a malaria advocacy project of the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, has been addressing challenges in measuring advocacy outcomes since its inception. Since 2006, the Voices Project has advocated for improved implementation, increased funding, and increasing access for millions of Africans to malaria control interventions. In Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, and Uganda, Voices focused on key actions such as building partnership, promoting data use, and shining a spotlight on malaria control successes and challenges. Voices recruited top leaders in those countries including Ministers, MPs, Heads of State, district authorities and mayors to become malaria champions by educating them, and making them aware of the importance of malaria control as a development issue. It is often difficult to establish the relationship between advocacy activities and the policy outcomes that those activities seek to influence. The Voices project resolves this difficulty by adapting Ross and Stover's approach for measuring government level policies and programs around a health issue. 55 key informants were asked to provide quantitative ratings of the national Malaria Control Program. These ratings were compared between low dose and high dose countries, to measure relationship between advocacy and policy outcomes. Initial findings from the analyses showed that in high dose countries, policies implementation, partnership, visibility of malaria and use of data for decision-making improved considerably more than in low dose countries. These findings support the contribution of Voices activities to observed improvements in malaria control.