20/08/2026
PRESS STATEMENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
20 August 2026
STOP BEGGING FOREIGN DONORS TO SAVE NIGERIANS FROM MOSQUITOES — MARKS WORLD MOSQUITO DAY 2026
Today, 20 August, the world marks World Mosquito Day, In Nigeria, a country that carries one of the heaviest malaria burdens on the entire planet, this day should be a moment of national shame and national resolve, shame that a preventable, treatable disease still kills our children in their thousands every year, and resolve that this must be the generation that ends it, on our own terms.
A NATIONAL FAILURE DRESSED UP AS A FOREIGN FUNDING CRISIS
When the United States suspended major global health aid in 2025, the Nigerian government's response was to hurriedly approve an additional $200 million for the health sector as an emergency patch. That single fact tells the whole story: malaria control in Nigeria has never truly been a Nigerian government priority. It has been a donor-funded programme that our government administers, not a domestically-owned national mission that our government leads and finances.
This must end. No country has ever developed by outsourcing the protection of its own population to the goodwill of foreign governments whose priorities can shift overnight and without warning.
THE MONEY EXISTS, IT IS SIMPLY NOT GOING WHERE IT SHOULD
Nigeria does not lack resources. It lacks the political will to direct them toward the health, sanitation, and environmental infrastructure that would make mosquito-borne disease a manageable, shrinking problem rather than a permanent national emergency. Across Africa, countries that chose to prioritise this fight found the money: Zambia raised domestic malaria commodity funding by 222% in two years; Sudan, a country at war, raised malaria funding by 400% in a single year. Nigeria, at peace and with far greater national revenue, has no excuse to be reacting to crises instead of preventing them.
Meanwhile, the conditions for mosquito breeding are allowed to fester in plain sight across Lagos and other Nigerian cities: blocked and uncleared drainage channels, uncollected waste piling up and holding stagnant water, and dams and water infrastructure left without proper maintenance. These are not acts of nature. They are the direct, foreseeable consequences of governance that has failed to treat environmental sanitation as public health infrastructure.
WHAT DEMANDS
We call on the Federal Government of Nigeria, state governments, and local authorities to:
- Fund and fix drainage, waste management, and dam maintenance as a public health obligation, not a beautification project. Every blocked gutter and every open dumpsite is a breeding ground we have chosen, through neglect, to leave standing.
- Build a health budget that does not depend on foreign donors to function. Nigeria must fund universal access to malaria diagnosis and treatment domestically, following the model of the African nations that have achieved malaria-free status, sustained investment, trained health workers, and treatment available to every citizen regardless of ability to pay.
- Deliver free, quality public education, including in the sciences, so that Nigerian entomologists, public health researchers, and environmental health professionals are trained and retained at home, rather than the country depending indefinitely on foreign-trained expertise and foreign research agendas.
- Invest seriously in local research, science, and technology to study Nigeria's own mosquito populations and disease patterns. Insecticide resistance is already widespread among the major malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and an invasive urban mosquito species capable of thriving in cities has already been detected in Nigeria. We cannot out-source the answer to a Nigerian-specific problem.
- Treat mosquito control and pest management as a funded profession within the health system, not an afterthought left to individual households to solve with their own money.
OUR POSITION
"Nigeria loses more people to malaria in a year than most conflicts lose to bullets, and yet we still budget for this disease as if it were someone else's emergency to solve."
"We are done asking foreign donors to fund our way out of a crisis that our own governance failures created and sustain. The blocked drain in our street, the refuse heap at the end of our road, the health centre with no drugs, these are policy choices, not acts of God. This World Mosquito Day, our message to government at every level is simple: internalise this fight, fund it like the national emergency it is, and stop treating the Nigerian people's protection from a mosquito bite as a line item dependent on another country's budget."
will continue to mobilise, document, and demand accountability until mosquito-borne disease elimination is treated as the non-negotiable national priority it should have been all along.
Francis Nwapa
Convener,
Malaria Consortium Malaria Partners International RBM Partnership to End Malaria Malaria No More British Pest Control Association World Health Organization (WHO) APCA
