Consultative Forum on
the Affordable Medicines Facility

How do you get effective drugs against malaria to people in the most rural spots in Africa and Asia, and make it quick (children can die in a matter of hours) and inexpensive? And, at the same time,  protect artemisinin derivatives—the world’s best malaria drugs for at least the next decade—from being lost to drug-resistant malaria, as other effective drugs have been. With the world poised to control and then eliminate malaria, “business as usual” isn’t the answer.

At the same time that a Global Malaria Action Plan was being unveiled to the U.N. General Assembly,  RFF was hosting malaria experts from around the globe to debate the merits of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria—AMFm, also known as Radio Malaria, an innovative financing platform for malaria drugs. It’s also integral to the new global plan to control malaria. Professor Kenneth Arrow, the Nobel Laureate in Economics who led the Institute of Medicine committee that recommended AMFm in its 2004 report, Saving Lives, Buying Time, was among a dozen speakers to address the September 27 public forum. He explained (via videotape) the basic idea behind AMFm:  subsidize the world’s supply of artemisinins at the point they leave the factory, in contrast to subsidizing further down the distribution chain, which has been the usual approach. The drugs would flow through the existing public- and private-sector supply chains, gaining only the usual drug markups, and arriving in clinics, pharmacies, and the ubiquitous corner shops at the same low prices as the old, now-ineffective antimalarial drugs like chloroquine. Artemisinins are cheap by U.S. standards at $5–10 per course of treatment, but without the subsidy, that cost would be astronomical where household income is typically $1 per day or less.