The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Inter-American Development Bank, and Carlos Slim Foundation announced a $180 million initiative to eliminate malaria in Central America.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, and Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the IDB, announced the Regional Malaria Elimination Initiative, or RMEI, at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Involving $83.6 million of new funding — with $37.1 million from IDB, $31.5 million from Gates, and $15 million from the Carlos Slim Foundation — the plan is expected to leverage $100 million in domestic financing and $39 million of existing donor resources over the next five years.

While one of the challenges with malaria eradication is that donor funding can dwindle as the number of cases fall, RMEI aims to close both the financing and technical gaps that stand in the way of country elimination in the Dominican Republic, Belize, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, and Nicaragua.

The Gates Foundation has typically focused its malaria work in the Greater Mekong subregion, where drug resistance presents a major challenge, and Southern Africa, where there are a number of existing partnerships to achieve elimination. There has been less of an emphasis on Central America and Hispaniola, despite the fact that cases are low in that region and that, with existing tools and strategies, elimination might be possible.

Read more about the plan to eliminate malaria in Central America by Catherine Cheney at Devex