The World Bank announced Sunday it will expand its fight against Malaria, one of Africa’s biggest killers, because global efforts in the past five years have failed.

The global development lender said in a report that the new strategy includes a special task force to ensure that antimalarial efforts are part of its lending programs for poor countries.

It also includes additional funding to replicate in other countries antimalarial programs that have been successful in Brazil, Eritrea, India and Vietnam, the report said.

“The Global Strategy and Booster Program responds to the inadequacy of global efforts to control malaria and the modesty of the bank’s current efforts relative to its potential,” the report said.

Under the program, the bank will increase distribution of bed nets and antimalarial drugs and provide support to countries that lower taxes and tariffs on medicines to treat the disease.

In an unusually candid statement, the World Bank said global efforts in the past five years came up short.

“Experience in the past five years shows that a pledge of commitment…with neither a clearly funded program for malaria control nor the internal budget to ensure that the bank’s malaria team can function effectively, does not lead to success on a large scale,” the bank said. “A different and more robust approach is needed for success.”

Initial estimates put new funding needs at between $500 million and $1 billion over the next five years, the bank said, adding that plans were to raise the money in and outside the bank, including from public and private sectors.

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that kills more than 1 million people a year and sickens many more, mostly children under the age of five, the bank estimated. There are 500 million new cases a year, it said.

EFFECT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH

“For many countries, controlling malaria is crucial to reduce the staggering numbers of mothers and children who die every year from this preventable and curable disease,” said Jean-Louis Sarbib, senior vice president for human development at the bank.

It is also good for economic growth, Sarbib said.

Annual growth in gross domestic product per capita in countries where malaria occurs averaged 0.4 percent between 1965 and 1990, compared with 2.3 percent in the rest of the world, according to bank data.

The Lancet medical journal said on Friday a global partnership of more than 90 organizations and countries to reduce deaths from malaria may have done more harm than good.

It said rates of infection and deaths from the disease had actually risen since the Roll Back Malaria partnership, which includes the World Bank and World Health Organization, pledged to cut them in 2000.

The World Bank report said Africa was the worst affected region, followed by Southeast Asia, the eastern Mediterranean region, and western Pacific.

It said malaria had made a resurgence because of resistance to traditional first-line treatments such as chloroquine and sulfadoxine pyrimethamine.

The bank hopes the international community could help make the new and effective artemisinin-based combination therapy more available to the poor and invest more in research on a possible malaria vaccine, the report said.

Some scientists argue that the drug combination is too expensive for African countries.