In The News
ExxonMobil Fuels Innovation in Africa
August 7, 2013, Washington D.C. - Although eliminated in some parts of the world, malaria continues to devastate much of sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 215 million people are afflicted by the disease each year. Young children and pregnant women are disproportionately impacted, leaving them weakened and vulnerable to other diseases. This places an enormous burden on already strained health systems in the region. In African countries with a high malaria burden, an average of 40 percent of health resources are estimated to be spent on the fight against malaria. Most importantly, the 655,000 malaria-related deaths each year have a profound and unacceptable impact on society.
ExxonMobil has a long tradition of driving advances in the world’s fight against malaria, by fueling innovation in ways only the private sector can. In 2005, Accordia Global Health Foundation and ExxonMobil formed a partnership designed to develop more effective ways to prepare Africa’s health professionals to prevent, diagnose, and treat malaria among the communities they serve. During the first five years of our partnership, ExxonMobil and Accordia collaborated to design, implement, and evaluate a new, cost-effective approach to improving quality of malaria care in Africa’s public and private healthcare sectors. An overview of this outstanding program can be found in the National Malaria Training Model report.
Today, ExxonMobil is taking their leadership to the next level – by investing in the establishment of a truly transformative institution in Nigeria, to drive research and education around malaria in the region. The West African Infectious Diseases Institute (WAIDI) will be a collaborative research institution based in Abuja, operating as a multi-institutional resource to help enhance research being conducted by local physicians and scientists throughout Nigeria and the region. WAIDI will attract international resources, linking global experts with local investigators to conduct ground-breaking research in infectious disease, and develop new regional leaders in the field. It will be locally-owned and -led, but will bring key international linkages, highly-specialized infrastructure, and sound institutional capacity to strategically link and support the region’s universities and other key health sector stakeholders to advance health science, education, and capacity in West Africa.
ExxonMobil understands that, if given the right resources and opportunity, African researchers can themselves lead successful efforts to eradicate this disease that is having such an enormous impact on their continent.
Accordia Global Health Foundation would like to thank ExxonMobil for its unwavering commitment to reducing the burden of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa – and, in doing so, saving countless lives.
