title: Reimagining malaria: five reasons to strengthen community engagement in the lead up to malaria elimination.
abstract: Although community engagement has been recognized as an important element of public health since the Alma Ata declaration, in practice community engagement has played a marginal role within malaria control programmes. As more countries move toward elimination, malaria elimination programmes will need to reimagine malaria in a number of ways. An important element of this will be to re-conceptualize and better strategize community engagement, which will become increasingly important for programme success as countries near elimination. This commentary intends to begin a conversation on re-imagining community engagement in an elimination setting, by outlining five ways that community engagement should be strengthened and re-strategized in the lead up to malaria elimination.
authors.affiliation: University of Queensland School of Public Health, Herston, QLD, Australia. m.whittaker@uq.edu.au.
authors.forename: Maxine
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Whittaker
authors.affiliation: Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore. cat.catherinesmith@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D003140:Communicable Disease Control / Q000379:methods*; D003256:Community Participation / Q000379:methods*; D060740:Disease Eradication; D018562:Disease Transmission, Infectious / Q000517:prevention & control*; D006801:Humans; D008288:Malaria / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000517:prevention & control*