The purpose of this tool is to help program managers estimate the impact of past or future malaria campaigns. Users can model the impact of insecticide treated bednets (ITN) and/or seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC). The tool is intended to be easy to use, requiring only a few pieces of information to generate meaningful results.
For ITN campaigns, the tool estimates the impact on access and use, malaria incidence, and child mortality. It does this by simulating the population of a country or sub-national area, then increasing the number of households that have and use an ITN (based on information about your campaign), and modeling the impact of those increases on malaria incidence and child mortality. For SMC campaigns, the tool estimates the impact on malaria incidence.
In addition to campaign-specific information, the tool uses data from commonly available sources, including Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Multi-cluster Indicator Surveys (MICS), UN population estimates, UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, and the Lives Saved Tool. This information is set by default, depending on the country or sub-national areas you have selected.
The following video gives a quick introduction to the tool. For a more detailed walk-through of the tool, you can find a longer, tutorial video at the bottom of this page. For a description of the tool's underlying statistical methods, see this document.
This is the first version of the Malaria Campaign Impact Calculator. If you have questions or comments about the tool, contact John Hembling at john.hembling@crs.org
Getting Started
To get started, go to the “Inputs” tab at the top right-hand corner of this page, or click on “Use the tool” button above. There you can select your program (ITN and/or SMC), country and sub-national area, as appropriate. Next, enter information about your campaign. Use the sliders to change the input numbers. The blue inputs should reflect your own program data or assumptions. The purple inputs should reflect data from the country or sub-national area (e.g., from the country’s latest DHS or MIS survey). When you select a country and sub-national area, it will load the country default data for the purple inputs, although you can override each input as you wish.
Adjusting Inputs
Most inputs are adjusted with a range, rather than an exact number. This allows you to account for uncertainty in your input values. If you are confident about the value for an input, set a narrow range (e.g., +/- 5). If you are unsure of the value, set a wider range (e.g., +/- 10), and the model will take your uncertainty into account.
Calculating Results
Once you have adjusted all the inputs, you can run the model by clicking "Calculate quick", which should only take a few seconds. Note that each time you use “Calculate quick” with the same input values, the results will vary slightly. If you are happy with the input values and you want to obtain final estimates, click “Calculate stable”. This option takes longer (several minutes), but will give you more consistent numbers each time it is run. After the model has finished calculating, you will be taken to the “Results” tab. The results are presented in one single table, showing outcome-level results for ITN and SMC components, and the combined impact of all campaign components on malaria cases and deaths.
You can save your inputs by clicking “Save” at the top of the page. This will give you a file that you can save and reupload at a later date to recreate your estimates.