Potential Disparity between money spent and benefit achieved

LONDON — Health groups have spent more than a billion dollars and bought millions of bednets to fight malaria, and 20 African countries have increased their bednet coverage at least fivefold, new research says.
In a report on the status of malaria in Africa issued on Monday by UNICEF and Roll Back Malaria, a U.N.-led partnership, the authors said $1.8 billion was spent last year, a 10-fold jump since 2004. More than 150 million insecticide-treated bednets to protect against the mosquito-borne disease have been produced and donors have purchased 160 million drug treatments.
If the bednets are indeed getting to people at risk, that number puts some countries on target to reach a U.N. goal of providing a bednet to all 350 million people at risk of malaria by the end of this year, officials said.
But other experts said the figures are an artificial symbol of success against the disease.
"These are meaningless input measures that tell us only (the UN) is effective at spending other people's money," said Philip Stevens, a health-policy expert at the London think tank International Policy Network.
Richard Tren, director of Africa Fighting Malaria, an Africa and US-based advocacy group, said measuring malaria spending and the numbers of drugs bought did not always mean more Africans had access to them.
Tren said he had once been in Uganda when the central warehouse had plenty of malaria drugs but clinics throughout the country had none. "They had no trucks to deliver anything," he said.
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