The Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) Alliance is a group of SMC stakeholders including the national malaria programmes (NMPs) of SMC implementing countries and other policy makers, multilateral and non-governemental organisations, product development partnerships, global health funding agencies, academics and research organisations. 

SMC has been recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2012 as a tool for the prevention of malaria in at-risk children living in areas where malaria transmission is seasonal. Since then, it has been well accepted and widely deployed by NMPs and local communities, whose youngest populations continue to benefit from its protective effects. In 2022, WHO published consolidated malaria guidelines, which provide more flexibility to NMPs to adapt malaria prevention and control strategies to their local context. For SMC for example, the updated guidelines no longer define geographic restrictions and provide greater flexibility in recognising age-based risk.

The SMC Alliance is convening this review and planning meeting with key SMC stakeholders, SMC focal points within NMPs and NMP coordinators to look back over 10 years of successful SMC implementation and discuss the perspectives of this intervention in the context of revised WHO malaria guidelines and recent developments and innovations in the malaria prevention space. This will include discussions on the positioning  of SMC within the portfolio of chemoprevention strategies, the implications for SMC of the malaria vaccine roll-out, and the impact of increased parasite resistance to antimalarial drugs.

Objectives

The objectives of the meeting are to:

• Review coverage results vs forecasted needs, and detailed partner involvement from the 2022 campaign.
• Share best practices during SMC campaigns.
• Share updates on ongoing SMC projects.

• Celebrate 10 years of successful scale up and implementation of SMC.
• Review and share lessons learnt from the 2022 campaign.
• Review forecasts for 2023 and 2024 campaigns.
• Plans for the 2023 campaign and discussing the technical assistance needed and overall coordination of SMC activities; countries’ funding strategy and anticipated partners contribution.