Press Release
 WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 -- Over thirty African Ambassadors attended a Roll Back Malaria Partnership event hosted by the World Bank Thursday and agreed to support greater transparency and public accountability for the funds being used to combat malaria.
Challenged by an emotional appeal from international singing sensation and UNICEF Regional Spokesperson for Malaria, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, the ambassadors agreed their countries would benefit from more clarity on how they are using funds -- and donors should come clean on exactly how much they are contributing.
"I have been all over Africa and it is clear we must work together. No African country can achieve rapid scale up on their own," Chaka Chaka said after a stunning performance in the World Bank's Atrium. "No one single donor can fund it all. No one UN agency can support it all. We need to work in partnership -- with recipient country governments, with the private sector, civil society, and all donors."
On her way to New York to take part in the Youth United Against Malaria Concert, part of a three-day United Nations Global Youth Leadership Summit, Chaka Chaka thanked host World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz for his leadership on malaria and requested his continued support.
 Wolfowitz proclaimed that malaria was at the top of the Bank's development agenda. "The Bank obviously cannot combat malaria alone and coordination is key. Demand for resources is outstripping supply," Wolfowitz said. "While the Bank, the US and the Global Fund are providing financing approaching US$1billion a year, more is clearly needed including increased contributions from African countries themselves."
Wolfowitz called on the ambassadors to demonstrate successes so that funding could continue to flow. "We donors," said Wolfowitz, "must live up to our end of the bargain . As countries develop their plans and invest their own resources and achieve results ... money should not hold them back from saving more lives."
The ambassadors committed themselves to be soldiers in the fight against malaria to improve infrastructure, ensure accountability, and stop losing 3000 African children a day to a preventable and treatable disease.
Zambia's ambassador Her Excellency Inonge Mbikusita- Lewanika said her country was making great strides against the disease with support from the Global Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among others, but emphasized that more resources were still needed to take these successful efforts to scale."
The ambassadors will meet in coming weeks to discuss concrete next steps that will lead to greater accountability and transparency and save more lives.
The luncheon was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Communication Programs, the Global Health Council, and Friends of the Global Fight.
Roll Back Malaria Partnership
To provide a coordinated international approach to fighting malaria, the Roll Back Malaria Partnership was launched in 1998 by the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank. The Partnership now brings together governments of countries affected by malaria, their bilateral and multilateral development partners, the private sector, non-governmental and community-based organizations, foundations, and research and academic institutions around the common goal of halving the global burden of malaria by 2010.
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