The Regional Initiative for the Elimination of Malaria (RMEI) aims to end malaria in Mesoamerica in 2022. This is how we are going to make history.

The State Government, through the Ministry of Health, recognized the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as a partner for promoting projects that strengthen timely care of obstetric and neonatal complications, which contribute to the reduction of maternal and infant mortality in the most vulnerable communities of the 18 municipalities of Sanitary Jurisdiction number II of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.

The Ministry of Health of El Salvador (MINSAL) will invest US$850,000 until January 2021 with the objective of further strengthening and improving the quality of health services for women and children in the poorest areas of the country. This investment is the result of a new agreement reached with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to extend the activities of the Salud Mesoamérica Initiative (SMI), a project that has made significant progress over the past eight years in providing access to quality health services for more than 26,000 children and 59,000 women.

In 2013, only 30 percent of newborn children in Belize received quality medical care. Four years later, in 2017, this figure rose to 89 percent. Improvement of quality in health services has benefitted not only the newborns, but it has had a positive impact on women. For example, the use of oxytocin after delivery increased by thirty percentage points, being applied in up to 90 percent of deliveries. Likewise, 75 percent of women received the care they needed in the first seven days after delivery, a figure that increased by over thirty percentage points since 2013.

La Ciénaga. That is the name of the Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) neighborhood where the malaria parasite will pay the heaviest price for its defeat. There, in an area that was previously green and wet, over 17,000 people have lived for over four years, and in precarious conditions, divided into three sectors. Most of them are young migrants from rural zones or coming from the border with Haiti, who have travelled to Santo Domingo with the hope of finding a better future. However, the conditions of the environment they live in has made them prone to the disease.

Eggs are a good source of nutrients for growth and development. We hypothesized that introducing eggs early during complementary feeding would improve child nutrition.

The RMEI (Regional Malaria Elimination Initiative) technical partners met on February 18 - 20 in El Salvador with the purpose of coordinating the final details for the implementation of the plans aimed at eliminating malaria by 2020 in the seven Mesoamerican countries, in addition to Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. The goal of the meeting was to incorporate the malaria foci management focus proposed by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and, in this manner, have a single foci focus for all the countries.

Aceso Global has been working with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on the Salud Mesoamérica Initiative (SMI). SMI is a pioneering public-private partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carlos Slim Foundation, the Government of Spain, the IDB, the countries of Central America, and the state of Chiapas, Mexico. It is one of the most successful and thoughtfully designed results-based aid (RBA) models and we are excited to join and contribute to their effort, while also learning from their work.