Strengthening health and disease modelling for public health decision making

Malaria is a major cause of ill health and death in children, particularly in Africa. Chemoprevention and vaccination are thus highly recommended to protect young children from malaria infection in endemic countries. About 40 countries in Africa have shown interest in rolling out malaria vaccines with the ambition of reaching the global target of reducing malaria cases by 90% by 2030. We will model different combinations of seasonal, perennial, and post- discharge malaria chemoprevention strategies and vaccination to understand how they complement or create redundancies in terms of impact, and cost- effectiveness at different vaccine uptake levels. Our aims are i) to generate scientific evidence for optimal deployment of existing and novel malaria interventions at sub-national levels in high-burden high-impact countries, and ii) to strengthen modeling capacity and the use of modeling by decision-makers in Africa. Our consortium consists of three institutions in East Africa, and two in Europe, which will collaborate with other modeling units, national malaria and vaccination programs, and international agencies supporting malaria control programs. Our team is multidisciplinary with experienced mathematical and economic modelers, social scientists, epidemiologists, and policymakers. Keywords: malaria, vaccine, chemoprevention, cost-effectiveness, modeling