Operational Research Prioritization Process

In a time of stalled progress and multiple threats to effective malaria control, clear guidance on best practices for achieving and maintaining high levels of intervention coverage and for deploying new tools and approaches are critical to the success of malaria control and elimination efforts. The U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) Insights Project, in collaboration with the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, carried out a broad stakeholder consultation process to identify pressing evidence gaps in malaria strategy and guidelines and to define a set of country-driven operational research (OR) and program evaluation (PE) priorities to address the gaps. Given the emphasis placed on locally-led research in PMI’s latest strategy to end malaria faster, the consultive process engaged 128 global, national, and local stakeholders from 26 countries in order to ground the topics in malaria endemic country perspectives. An external evaluation committee composed of seventeen sub-Saharan Africa based malaria experts assessed each topic’s relevance and potential for impact.

Key themes that emerged from the research prioritization process were:

• NMPs need more evidence on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of different interventions and intervention packages to guide programming and subnational tailoring of interventions;
• Evidence on effective strategies to reach and maintain high coverage of core malaria interventions is a priority for NMPs;
• Health system challenges need to be addressed in order to improve effective coverage of malaria interventions.

The process resulted in a defined set of 33 OR and PE topics that reflect critical evidence gaps that are impeding many NMPs’ achievement of high coverage of malaria interventions and the effective deployment of new tools. The prioritized list of topics cover five thematic areas including:

• Prevention
• Chemoprevention
• Case management
• Surveillance, monitoring, and evaluation
• Other crosscutting themes

If addressed, the prioritized topics have the potential to support the achievement of high coverage of malaria interventions and ensure continued progress toward improved malaria control and elimination.