Journal of Health and Medical Research

Community Medicine Distributors play a key role in community based initiative for malaria control. They complement the effort of Primary Health Care services to deliver prompt and effective treatment for uncomplicated malaria and prompt referral of severe cases in the community. However, high attrition rate of CMDs “ often resulting from lack of motivation and incentives€“ can be a major obstacle to the sustainability and effectiveness in any intervention. While the HMM intervention project has proved to be life transforming in this study area, community support for CMDs was a serious challenge to sustainability of the programme. Providing CMDs with incentives to motivate them to continue their volunteering work over a prolonged period of time and regular supply of AL in the health care facilities are paramount to sustainability. Mechanisms of providing incentives to CMDs need to be developed. Operational research to determine the reasons for community non-committal and comparison of effectiveness of various incentives mechanism suggested in this study and other related past studies is recommended.