The MESA Alliance believes that in order to control and eliminate malaria, there is a need to sustain, as part of a global response, the scientific research effort behind engineering innovations to better combat the disease and manage its carriers, as well as strengthening human knowledge on optimizing intervention strategies on the ground. We work towards this mission by emphasizing and complementing the use and examination of evidence in different strategic contexts, to ensure that global policymaking and programme implementations on the ground are evidence-based and strengthened through new understanding. We are hosted by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and support fulfilling its mandate as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Malaria Control, Elimination and Eradication.

The MESA Alliance, originally named as the Malaria Eradication Scientific Alliance, was born out of a systematic review of malaria science priorities and challenges by a broad range of stakeholders and leading researchers who collaboratively produced the first Malaria Eradication Research Agenda (malERA) in 2011. It illustrated to the community at-large and to the scientific world the needs and gaps in knowledge across nine research and development areas. Since then an update exercise was conducted by bringing over 180 contributors into 6 working panels to carry out a subsequent revision to this forward-looking perspective, and the malERA Refresh agenda was released in 2017. The MESA Alliance functions behind this overarching concept that such a global agenda needs to be sustained, coordinated and optimized.