Cameroon and the Malaria Response: What Happened When Funding Stopped

The 2025 pause in U.S. foreign aid disrupted the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), which had supported prevention and treatment programmes across many African countries. PMI's long-term activities have been credited with major reductions in malaria burden, including millions of lives saved and billions of cases prevented, while delivering nets, tests and treatments to vulnerable communities.

In Cameroon's Far North region the impact was acute: PMI had funded roughly half of the community health workers who do door-to-door diagnosis and treatment, and the National Malaria Control Programme confirmed that 2,105 out of 2,354 U.S.-funded workers were no longer working. The stop-work order and frozen payments created shortages of injectable artesunate and delays in net distribution, and a limited waiver in February 2025 allowed some life-saving services to resume, although many operations remained disrupted.

Before the pause, bed net campaigns and seasonal chemoprevention had helped cut deaths from malaria; mortality in parts of the region fell markedly between 2020 and 2024. Nevertheless, early 2025 data and local reports show rising fatalities, and gaps in surveillance make it difficult to measure the full scale of the setback.

Consequently, health leaders and community teams are stretching scarce supplies and focusing on rapid diagnosis and referral, while international partners and programmes reassess how to sustain gains. If funding and supply chains are not restored, there is a real risk that progress achieved over the last decade could be reversed. Donor agencies and non-governmental organisations are exploring stock transfers and local hiring to keep services running while negotiations continue. Community health volunteers, who can travel by bicycle, are trying to reach remote families despite the shortages.