The Greater Mekong Subregion Elimination of Malaria through Surveillance (GEMS+) program supports national malaria programs in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam to integrate the private sector into national malaria elimination strategies, surveillance systems, planning, and management structures.
In the initial phase of GEMS programming (2016 – 2019), Population Services International (PSI) supported a diverse private sector network of 25,000 outlets to provide quality case management and timely case reporting into national health management information systems. Over four years, the PSI-supported network tested over 3.5 million suspected cases and detected nearly 100,000 malaria cases. In the final year of the program, the GEMS private sector network detected between 1.3% – 18.7% of the national caseload in the four countries.
The GEMS+ program, a 3-year follow-on to GEMS, represents an ambitious investment with the primary objective of transitioning private sector malaria programs to government oversight by the end of 2022.