Policy Brief of Malaria in Nigeria

There will be a writing assignment in the course that will involve creating a policy brief from you, the Secretary of Health, to the Minister of Finance. As you write the brief, you must put yourself into the role of the Secretary of Health.
The policy brief should be four pages long, double-spaced, and written in 12-point Times New Roman font. The four pages must not include the title page or the reference list and half a page under or over the page limit is acceptable. APA 7th edition formatting should be used as per the “Student Paper” example on the OWL at Purdue website located here: https://owl(dot)purdue(dot)edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/apa _sample_paper.html . The paper cannot exceed 4.5 pages or it will not be graded.
The policy brief should be written in a very clear, crisp manner using short sentences, short paragraphs, and as few words as possible. Each paper needs to be written in a manner that will allow the Aide of the Minister of Finance to go over the contents of the brief with the Minister in about three minutes in a car on the way to an important meeting, since that is often what happens in real life.
Ideally the policy brief should be written on a low- or middle-income country, since the poorer countries are the focus of the course. Writing the policy brief will allow you to explore selected health and development issues in a variety of settings, and in a manner much deeper than will be possible in class.
The policy brief should answer the following questions:
• What is the nature and magnitude of the problem?
• Who is affected by it?
• What are the determinants of and risk factors for the problem?
• What are the health, economic, and social consequences of the problem?
• What few priority steps do you recommend be taken to address the problem, at least cost,
in doable, sustainable, and fair ways? What is your rationale for these recommendations?
Write the summary and the topic sentence as if it is the only thing that the Minister of Finance is going to read. Your evidence-based story line should include who gets the disease, why they get it, why the reader should care, and how the problem can be addressed in the fastest, least- expensive manner possible. When you make your argument, give information about the relative cost-effectiveness of your proposal with evidence.
The policy brief should follow the above outline, with one exception. It should start with a single paragraph that summarizes for the Minister all the points you want to make. The summary paragraph should be several sentences long and should be single-spaced. Here is an example of a good summary paragraph:
“About XXX people die every year of TB in our country. The incidence of TB is XXX. About XXX people in our country get drug-resistant TB each year, and about XXX% of those who are

infected with HIV have active TB disease. TB affects largely the urban and rural poor and stems from poverty, general ill health, and the lack of coverage of our health services. TB causes illness for an extended period, stops people from working, causes them to spend large amounts on health, and leads many families into poverty. DOTs is a low cost approach to TB diagnosis and treatment that we are not using sufficiently. We must immediately expand our DOTs program, starting in the north, where the disease burden is highest. We must increase case detection and treatment success rates. We must also pay special attention to the diagnosis and management of drug-resistant TB and to TB/HIV co-infection.”
The paper must begin with this “one paragraph tells all” summary, written in single line spacing.
Topic
The policy brief will summarize, for a country of your choice, the burden of either a particular infectious disease OR a particular non-communicable disease. It will state who is most affected by this disease/condition, the key risk factors, the economic and social costs of the disease/condition, and what might be done to address the disease/condition in cost-effective ways. Note that since TB/HIV co-infection was used in the sample summary paragraph above, students may not use it as the topic of their policy brief.
Submissions and Grading
You will submit your policy brief electronically preferably in Word format to the appropriate ‘Assignments’ folder on UM Learn. The grader-marker for the course will mark your policy brief. The course instructor will selectively review some of the policy briefs as well. Once marked, the feedback will be returned to you electronically via your UM Learn Assignments folder.
Please save your policy brief in the following format so that the instructor and grader-marker can easily tell who wrote them: “Your Family Name, Policy Brief.docx or .doc”
The policy brief will be graded on the basis of:
• Following the guidelines of the assignment
• Clarity
• The logic of your argument
• Appropriate use of evidence and data, both about your country and comparative data • Reasonableness of your conclusions
• APA 7th edition formatting and grammar, spelling and flow.