Data needs for Elimination and Stratification
Malaria transmission often varies widely within countries, which means that applying an intervention on a national scale can be an inefficient use of scarce resources. In order to ensure that interventions are deployed most effectively, countries need to be subdivided into areas that share common features relevant to malaria transmission: for example, they may be stratified by geography, if some regions within them have higher transmission than others, or according to population characteristics if certain groups of people are at greater risk of malaria. The MMC is supporting country programs in the process of stratification, so that they can prioritize particular regions and populations at particular points in time, and maximize the impact of malaria control interventions. The MMC is also working to identify the types of data needed to make sure that this is done as accurately as possible.