Statement by Peter Sands on the World Malaria Report 2025
The World Malaria Report lays bare two truths: when we invest, we save lives — and when we falter, malaria surges back. This year’s Report, capturing the numbers from 2024, shows a stalling of overall progress and highlights serious concerns, but it stops short of pressing the emergency button. Yet we should. For years we have warned about stagnation, but cases are now clearly on the rise. When we get the numbers for 2025 they will most likely show even more cases and deaths. Unless we act with urgency now, 2026 will be even worse. We face a real risk of massive resurgence that could undo decades of progress and overwhelm health systems.
We know how to beat malaria — the 21 countries that have eliminated the disease since 2010 are proof. Yet last year malaria still killed more than 600,000 people, most of them young African children. When a child dies every minute from a demonstrably preventable disease, that is not just a health failure — it is a political failure, a financing failure and a moral failure.
Despite enormous gains over two decades, progress is stalling and, in some countries, reversing sharply. Drug resistance is spreading across Africa. Conflict, displacement and climate change are reshaping transmission patterns. Surveillance systems and bed net distribution campaigns have been disrupted. Sharp resurgences are emerging across multiple countries.
The Report also shows that when countries lead decisively, and when we invest adequate resources — as in the Greater Mekong Subregion and across a growing group of near-elimination nations — malaria can be pushed back dramatically. These successes prove that leadership, investment and community action work.
Yet in the highest-burden countries, mainly in Africa, we need to step up the fight. African leaders have set out the way forward through the Yaoundé Declaration. We have effective tools — including next-generation bed nets and other vector control interventions, new treatments and diagnostics, and vaccines — but we need to deploy them at far greater scale and pace. In many of the most affected places, we are simply not investing enough. Global financing is now less than half of what’s needed. At under US$4 billion, the total annual investment to fight malaria across Africa amounts to less than the budget of a single large hospital in a high-income country.
Underinvesting in fighting malaria has a staggering cost in children’s lives — and it also wastes money. Where we have eliminated malaria, we now need to spend only a fraction of prior investments to ensure it does not creep back. Where malaria is rampant, health facilities are overwhelmed, children miss school and workers fall sick. The economic case for investing to beat malaria is extraordinarily powerful.
For many in the rich world, malaria might seem like a distant problem. But we should not be complacent. Only 50 years ago malaria was still a threat in Southern Europe — and only 25 years before that, in the United States. With climate change, resistance and the emergence of more threatening mosquito species, we are seeing mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, chikungunya and malaria spread to new geographies.
The choice is stark: either we act now, or we will face a crisis that will cost lives and money. If we move decisively — to fund the fight, strengthen health systems and empower communities — we can reverse these alarming trends and beat malaria. But we must not simply wait for next year’s Report — because we already know much of what it will say.