Long lasting insecticidal bed nets ownership, access and use in a high malaria transmission setting before and after a mass distribution campaign in Uganda

INTRODUCTION: Uganda is conducting a second mass LLIN distribution campaign and Katakwi district recently received LLINs as part of this activity. This study was conducted to measure the success of the campaign in this setting, an area of high transmission, with the objectives to estimate LLIN ownership, access and use pre and post campaign implementation. METHODS: Two identical cross sectional surveys, based on the Malaria Indicator Survey methodology, were conducted in three sub-counties in this district (Kapujan, Magoro and Toroma), six months apart, one before and another after the mass distribution campaign. Data on three main LLIN indicators including; household LLIN ownership, population with access to an LLIN and use were collected using a household and a women’s questionnaire identical to the Malaria Indicator Survey. RESULTS: A total of 601 and 607 households were randomly selected in survey one and two respectively. At baseline, 60.57% (56.53–64.50) of households owned at least one net for every two persons who stayed in the household the night before the survey which significantly increased to 70.35% (66.54–73.96) after the campaign (p = 0.001). Similarly, the percentage of the household population with access to an LLIN significantly increased from 84.76% (82.99–86.52) to 91.57% (90.33–92.81), p = 0.001 and the percentage of household population that slept under an LLIN the night before the survey also significantly increased from 56.85% (55.06–58.82) to 81.72% (76.75–83.21), p = 0.001. CONCLUSION: The LLIN mass campaign successfully achieved the national target of over eighty-five percent of the population with access to an LLIN in this setting, however, universal household coverage and use were fourteen and three percent points less than the national target respectively. This is useful for malaria programs to consider during the planning of future campaigns by tailoring efforts around deficient areas like mechanisms to increase universal coverage and behavior change communication.