Economics of malaria

About

Three years

This PhD project, funded by through the Transdisciplinary Global Health programme (European Commission - Erasmus Mundus), will be carried out from 2016 to 2018.

Three institutions

ISGlobal (home institution)

Institut de Salut Global de Barcelona

CISM (field research institution)

Centro de Investigação em Saude de Manhiça

VU (secondary institution)

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Three main areas of research

Supply-side

Describing foreign firms' current engagement in malaria control activities, and analyzing the economic effect of privately-funded malaria prevention

Demand-side

Measuring community and individual preferences regarding malaria control through discrete choice experimentation

Impact-evaluation

Systematically quantifying the costs and economic impact of malaria control activities

Details

Papers

A selection of articles (both finished and in progress).

Road to eradication

Infrastructure and malaria

Policy and incentives

Cross-border malaria elimination

Identifying hotspots

Geospatial clusters of malaria

Efficient clustering algorithm

Optimizing public health resources

Malaria and worker productivity

Malaria's economic effect

Malaria's cognitive impact

Academics and disease

Systematic literature review

Malaria's economic effect

Cost of vaccination

Estimating vaccination costs

Health and wealth atlas

A digital mapping project

Timeline to eradication

A survey of malaria experts

FDI and CSR

Investment and malaria

Discrete choice experimentation

Community malaria control preferences

The research team

Experienced researchers in program evaluation, economics, epidemiology and public health.

Joe Brew

Doctoral fellow

Elisa Sicuri

Supervisor

Laia Cireira Crivillé

MALTEM researcher

Menno Pradhan

Co-supervisor

The research team is hosted at ISGlobal (Barcelona, Spain), CISM (Manhiça, Mozambique) and the VU (Amsterdam, Netherlands).

Details

A research initiative of MALTEM, ISGlobal, TGH and the CISM.

This is a project whose purpose is the generation of knowledge and presentation of evidence regarding the feasibility and suitability of foreign investment to finance the elimination of malaria in southern Mozambique.

This project aims to explore the impact - in both health and economic terms - of foreign investment in malaria control. It strives to follow a transdisciplinary approach to tackle a multitude of factors asociated with this complex topic. Specifically, those include (but are not limited to) a characterization of current foreign investment in the country; interest and availability of foreign investors to finance malaria elimination; burden of malaria among workers and its impact on productivity (and, by extension, economic growth); and community preferences on malaria control tools.

This projects aims to address the following questions:

What is the current situation of foreign direct investment and corporate social responsibility in Mozambique? Which are the main sectors attracting funding? Who are the major stakeholders?
Does there exist both interest and availability among foreign investors to invest in malaria elimination?
What is the burden of malaria among workers (of foreign firms) in the country? Is the burden heavier than in the general population?
Is there an association between malaria control initiatives funded by private firms and worker absenteeism/productivity?
Do the (potential) decreases in worker absenteeism and the (potential) increases in productivity translate to a positive ROI for firms investing in malaria control initiatives?
Which are workers' and communities' preferences regarding malaria control tools? Are the current tools being used in the malaria elminiation campaign acceptable?
What is the potential for private foreign-funded malaria control activity to complement local, national and international malaria control and elimination campaigns?
What is the potential benefit and risk for foreign-funded private malaria control initatives to replace other campigns?