APLMA Dashboard Report 2024

APLMA Dashboard Expansion 2025: GEDSI and Climate Change Dashboards

Malaria elimination, like all disease control efforts, hinges on the power of data to effectively track trends, monitor interventions, and evaluate impact. Data and insights are powerful tools that enable decisionmakers to make evidence-based policies, while fostering transparency and accountability in public health. In 2016, the Leaders’ Dashboard was developed following the endorsement of APLMA Malaria Elimination Roadmap at the 10^th East Asia Summit in 2015. It has been an invaluable resource for malaria leaders, national malaria programmes and researchers to track progress relative to priorities set out in the malaria elimination roadmap. Two other complementing thematic dashboards: Financing and Border Malaria (formerly Cross-border) were further included in 2024.

This year, through extensive consultations with relevant stakeholders, two more thematic dashboards on Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) and Climate Change and a Sandbox tool were added. The expansion reflects the growing need for and the significance of data and insights on equitable access for vulnerable populations, as well as climate change-related trends and their impact on health systems. The Sandbox, which consolidates data from a wide range of public and programmatic sources, such as the World Malaria Report, The Global Fund and data provided by various national programmes allows tailored curation of data reports and visualizations.

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Report on APLMA Dashboard

The APLMA Dashboard Report 2024 serves as a comprehensive guide on the capabilities and insights holistically offered by the APLMA Dashboard. As the region continues to advance progress towards achieving the 2030 malaria elimination target, the need for informed decision-making becomes increasingly critical. A key strength of the APLMA Dashboard is the ability to illustrate case distribution patterns, for countries to identify intervention priorities and guide resource allocation. This was evident during Indonesia’s national malaria elimination efforts, where data-driven decisions were made to focus malaria interventions on 14 high-burden districts of the Papua region where 90% of cases were concentrated.

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Observations like these serve as strong cues to focus on granularity and applicability to specific areas within the region. The EDEN initiative, a regional support mechanism for Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, and Vanuatu, is another powerful example of how developments within the region could be complemented by region-focused data.

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Features of Thematic Dashboards

· Leaders’ Dashboard: With updated data and enhanced visualizations, the flagship Leaders’ Dashboard continues to summarize malaria epidemiology, policy, and financing efforts for countries in the region, while providing an overview of progress made towards eliminating the disease. Three additional tabs have been added to the Leaders’ Dashboard to focus on countries at different stages of malaria elimination, with indicators and charts illustrating progress over time.

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· Financing Dashboard: Containing financing data over the current and previous Global Fund funding cycle, along with national and sub-regional funding breakdowns, the enhanced Financing Dashboard now offers users more visualization options. Users can now opt to sort countries by their funding source or funding gap and make side-by-side comparisons between specific countries. Data from the World Malaria Report has been added to supplement data from The Global Fund, providing a more comprehensive view of regional funding for malaria elimination.

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· Border Malaria Dashboard: Beyond imported cases, this dashboard now contains various policy indicators collected directly from national malaria programmes. Each subregion now has its own tab, containing useful information on the subregion as a whole, as well as information on its constituent countries. A curated section of resource links provides additional information to users.

· Country Profiles: Country profiles for each of the 22 countries that APLMA unites have been expanded to include more policy indicators on GEDSI, climate change, and One Health.

· GEDSI Dashboard: The GEDSI Dashboard contains data from the National Strategic Plans and Global Fund Funding Proposals. It spotlights how countries across the region are developing increasingly tailored elimination strategies targeting vulnerable populations.

· Climate Change Dashboard: This dashboard provides a regional overview of Asia Pacific’s health sector vulnerability to climate change, alongside national-level trends in climate-related weather events. Regional efforts towards adaptation are tracked through an analysis of Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans.

· Sandbox: The Sandbox is a customizable tool containing diverse dataset and metrics from across the region. Designed to allow users to create custom visualizations on various indicators, the Sandbox is APLMA’s contribution to increasingly data-driven efforts towards malaria elimination.

A Community Effort

The APLMA Dashboard serves as a community-centric repository of data that aims to foster greater collaboration and knowledge sharing. With this approach, APLMA would like to invite interested collaborators who wish to contribute to the further development of the content to reach out to us at https://www.aplma.org/contact. We appreciate feedback from partners on the various existing thematic areas like financing for malaria elimination, border malaria, GEDSI, climate change, and One Health – and remain open to suggestions on new areas we could explore in later development phases.

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Annex: Insights from Asia Pacific

While cases across the region rose for the second consecutive year in 2023, 7 countries – Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Viet Nam – succeeded in reducing their indigenous case counts from 2022. Particularly, Cambodia recorded a reduction in cases for the sixth consecutive year since 2017; Lao PDR recorded a 70.4% decrease in cases from 2022; and Papua New Guinea, which recorded nearly 60,000fewer cases than in 2022.

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Despite an overall increase in malaria-related deaths from 2022 to 2023, nearly half of the region reported zero deaths. Based on countries reports, 10 from the Asia Pacific region recorded zero deaths and 4 others showed reductions from the previous year. Notably, Bangladesh showed a significant improvement in2023, recording only 6 deaths compared to 14 in 2022, when the country recorded its first double-digit count since 2018.

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However, border malaria continues to be a problem in Asia Pacific. Among the region's 14 countries that reported imported case figures, only two reported decreases: Cambodia and Lao PDR.

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As reported by the 22 countries, domestic and external funding decreased between the year 2022 and 2023. In the context of the region’s present highest malaria case count since 2010, and its highest recorded death toll since 2017, this reduction in funding is a significant concern to the region’s malaria

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Read the full 2025 APLMA Dashboard Report below.