National malaria control programs (NMCPs) are frequently faced with making decisions that require trade-offs in order to best allocate scarce resources to control and eliminate malaria. With limited budgets, NMCPs need to choose how to fund staff, research, operations, essential drugs and diagnostics, and many other items in a manner that maximizes the potential impact on reducing malaria. A mismatch between product characteristics and NMCP need will result in overspending and opportunity costs because those wasted funds could have been used elsewhere.

This fact sheet explores these potential downstream consequences for NMCPs of upstream decisions made during the product development process on two examples related to diagnostics used in malaria case management.