The Kigali Summit on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases, held in Rwanda in June 2022, brought together world leaders to commit resources to the fight against malaria and other parasitic diseases. Rwanda and other African nations have made extraordinary progress in reducing malaria mortality through community distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, indoor residual spraying, and treatment programmes. The summit coincided with growing awareness of the impact of climate change on mosquito ranges and the risk of malaria resurgence even in countries that had achieved control.

African poets and writers have increasingly engaged with the politics of malaria control and the global inequity of parasitic disease burden in the twenty-first century. The contrast between a world in which wealthy nations are protected from mosquito-borne disease by economic development while poor nations continue to bear its full biological weight has become a subject of post-colonial and social justice poetry. Writers from Rwanda, Uganda, and across sub-Saharan Africa have used the bed net, the mosquito coil, and the antimalarial pill as contemporary poetic symbols of the global health divide.