AFRICA has made remarkable progress in fighting malaria under alliance championed by President Jakaya Kikwete, but the success was described here on Tuesday as fragile.
Launching a scorecard developed to track country accountability and action in malaria control, Mr Kikwete, who chairs the African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA), said the key challenge was how to sustain the gains under "overwhelming scarcity of resources."
Eleven members of the alliance have halved cases of malaria infections and deaths in the last decade through the use of treated bed nets, combination therapy treatment, improvement of diagnosis methods and indoor spraying of homes.
According to ALMA Executive Secretary, Johannah-Joy Phumaphi, the drive against malaria has relegated it to the third from the continent's first killer disease.
However, President Kikwete said it would take more hard work to achieve the UN goal to reduce malaria prevalence to near zero by 2015.
"We have to do whatever it takes to eradicate malaria. Losing the war is not an option," he asserted.
Ms Obiageli Ezekwesili, the Vice-President for Africa of the World Bank, which is a key supporter of the ALMA initiative, said at the ceremony held on the sideline of the UN General Assembly officially opening here on Thursday, that recipients of the bank's assistance must spend it judiciously.
She also called for mobilization of new resources from emerging economies and engagement of the private sector. The malaria drive has a 250 million US dollars (about 380bn/-) financial gap.
The disease infects 170 people in Africa every year and is estimated to slow down the continent's annual GDP growth by two per cent. Its eradication could save Africa 12 billion US dollars in direct costs annually.
Meanwhile, Tanzania has supported a shift in US development assistance policy that would focus more on women empowerment to unleash their potential to bolster global food security and enhance economic advancement.
The US Secretary of State, Ms Hilary Clinton, said at an international Conversation on Improving Global Food Security she hosted here on Tuesday, that her government was promoting the assistance of women farmers as an economic case.
"Women are the majority farmers (in developing countries) but they are 30 per cent less productive than male farmers," she lamented, citing bad policies denying them land ownership and use of poor farming methods.
In his intervention, President Jakaya Kikwete said women were the major players in Africa's agricultural production but they were poorer than men.
"To redress this, they must be given access to property. We have to change the bad traditions that say, for example, that girl children are not entitled to inherit family property," he explained.
Ms Clinton announced that her government would spend five million dollars (over 7bn/-) to research on women productivity and identify effective ways to support their efforts.
The Secretary of State said one billion people were going hungry worldwide and food production will have to be increased by 70 per cent by 2050 to meet growing demand.
If productivity of women farmers was optimized, they could feed an additional 150 million people annually, she said.
Other speakers said nutrition should be a key component of food supply, noting that food was often taken to mean maize, rice and other carbohydrates which lacked micro nutrients.
President Kikwete later addressed a symposium on non-communicable diseases at the New York University College of Dentistry, where he called for oral diseases to be integrated into national and international public health programmes.
He said dental diseases were closely linked to cardio vascular diseases, diabetes, cancer and respiratory disorders, which were the most paraded non-communicable diseases.
The symposium was organized by the Tanzania government through the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and co-hosted by Australia and Sweden.
Dons at the university said tooth decay was a global problem while there were only 1.5 billion dentists. In some African countries one dentist was expected to care for over a million people.
The symposium was a side-event of a high level meeting of the UN General Assembly, which adopted a resolution to put the four main non-communicable diseases high on the international agenda.
Meanwhile, President Kikwete was on Monday night awarded the South-South award for Global Health, Technology and Development in recognition of his government's efforts to improve health services using digital technology.
Other recipients of the award organized by the UN Economic Commission for Africa, International Telecommunication Union and South-South News, were Presidents Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal.
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