Malaria Consortium

Organisation

Malaria Consortium is a non-profit organisation founded in 2003 and based in London, working on malaria and other communicable diseases in Africa and Asia.¹ This page covers a single one of its programmes: seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), for which GiveWell lists Malaria Consortium as a top charity.¹

SMC protects children aged 3 to 59 months through the peak transmission season by giving them repeated courses of preventive antimalarial medicine. Malaria Consortium acts as implementing partner to national malaria programmes and, in defined geographies, carries end-to-end responsibility for the campaign, from planning and procurement through training and supervision to measurement.²

The problem: malaria

Globally in 2024 there were an estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610,000 deaths.³ The WHO African Region accounts for 94% of cases and 95% of deaths, and roughly three quarters of the deaths there are children under five.³ Nigeria carries the largest single share: 68.47 million cases in 2024, 24.3% of all cases worldwide and 38.6% of global malaria deaths among children under five.²

The decline of the past two decades has stalled. In the African Region, reported cases rose by 24% between 2015 and 2024.² Behind that lie population growth and better detection, but also constrained funding, overstretched health systems, conflict and displacement, and transmission patterns shifted by the climate crisis.² Global malaria funding in 2024 stood at $3.9 billion, 42% of the $9.3 billion target set for 2025.⁴

Where transmission is seasonal, most cases and deaths fall into a few months of the year, usually the rainy season. That window is what SMC targets.²

Approach

An SMC round consists of three to five cycles at 28-day intervals.² In each cycle a child receives a full course of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) and amodiaquine (AQ) over three days: the distributor administers the first dose under direct observation, and the caregiver gives the two remaining AQ doses on the following days. A full course protects for roughly 28 days.²

Delivery is mostly door-to-door, by trained distributors drawn from the communities themselves. In urban areas and in places affected by flooding or insecurity, fixed distribution points are added, and outreach teams are used for mobile and nomadic populations.² Children with a fever are not given SMC but referred for testing.²

Most of the work sits around the distribution itself: estimating the target population, ordering medicines a year ahead and moving them down to the last mile, informing communities, training staff through a cascade model, organising supervision, recording adverse reactions, and measuring after every cycle.² In 2025 the organisation procured 69,537,140 courses of medicine and trained 199,923 implementers with philanthropic funding.²

Impact

The evidence for the intervention itself is strong: a systematic review and meta-analysis found a 73% reduction in the incidence of uncomplicated malaria among children who receive SMC.²

What decides the case is whether a campaign reaches the children. Across the 2017 to 2021 rounds, in four-cycle areas 95% of target children received at least one cycle and 65% received all four.¹ Coverage measured after full rounds was 92% in Burkina Faso, 87% in Togo, 85% in Chad and 78% in Nigeria.¹

As of December 2023, GiveWell estimated the cost per death averted in the SMC areas it funds at $2,000–$7,000 depending on location; for the funding it directed in 2022–2024 it gives an average of around $4,000 per life saved, at roughly $7 to protect one child for a season.⁵ A single cycle for one child costs about $1.50 in total.¹

Malaria Consortium reports that in 2025, across all funding sources, it reached 23.52 million children, more than 40% of all children reached with SMC worldwide, of whom 17 million were funded philanthropically.²

Transparency

Malaria Consortium publishes an annual report on the philanthropically funded part of its SMC programme and a separate report on coverage and quality, and shares monitoring and cost data with GiveWell.¹²⁶

GiveWell also sets out reservations about that monitoring: coverage rests on caregivers' self-reports, most of the surveys it has reviewed had no auditing procedure, post-cycle and post-round surveys have diverged substantially in some campaigns, and the target population estimates are uncertain.¹ The organisation itself notes that administrative coverage regularly exceeds 100% for the same reasons.²

It also reports its failures. The 2024/25 round in Nampula province, Mozambique, was cancelled after post-election unrest, Cyclone Chido, a cholera outbreak and an unresolved payment dispute carried over from the previous season.² In Chad, 55,250 courses of medicine expired in December 2025 because first-expiry-first-out procedures were applied inconsistently.² Funding in Chad had previously been cut back sharply after GiveWell judged in 2023 that cost-effectiveness there fell below its funding bar; it revised that judgement in September 2024.²

Current projects

Periods and areas of the philanthropically funded 2025 round, the coverage achieved, and what is planned for 2026.²⁶

Why the Wealth for the World Fund funds Malaria Consortium

Because an intervention with strong trial evidence meets an organisation that can show the intervention actually reaches the children. The first half is research: SMC substantially reduces the incidence of uncomplicated malaria. The second half is the harder one, and it is the reason for this choice. Malaria Consortium surveys households after every cycle and every round, publishes the results, and opens up its cost data, so that outsiders can recompute what a donation buys.

Added to that, the organisation names its own failures: the cancelled round in Nampula, the expired medicines in Chad, the limits of its own surveys. An organisation that reports that way remains assessable when something goes wrong. Wealth for the World pays out to Malaria Consortium because the combination of proven efficacy, measured reach and open reporting is rare among organisations that can be checked at all.