JOHANNESBURG -- More than two years after African leaders and Western donors pledged to halve the number of deaths from malaria, the disease remains one of Africa's top killers, UN special advisor Jeffrey Sachs said on Monday.

Malaria kills one million people in Africa each year, the majority of them children under five, said Sachs, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

Unlike the HIV/AIDS pandemic also ravaging the world's poorest continent, malaria can be controlled if enough money is spent on fighting the disease. AIDS and malaria are the biggest killers in Africa.

Sachs reckons it would cost a little over $2 billion a year to control malaria, around one-tenth of what it costs African economies, and called for the World Bank to lead a special fund dedicated to fighting the disease.

"We haven't even started to make a dent in this disease," Reuters quoted Sachs, speaking before a UN summit on malaria this week, as saying.

"Given the enormity of HIV/AIDS and malaria, the scale of the need is vastly bigger than anything (the African governments) could undertake on their own," he added, speaking from Boston, Massachusetts in a teleconference.

"The World Bank should establish a special grant program for malaria, just like it has set up one for AIDS," he added.

At the 2000 Abuja summit in Nigeria, African leaders and global agencies vowed to halve malaria mortality in Africa by 2010 and set April 25 every year as African Malaria Day.

The mosquito-borne disease was to be fought with a combination of insecticide-treated bed nets, reduced taxes and tariffs on the nets and better access to effective treatment.

Some $750 million was pledged by international agencies, $500 million of it by the World Bank.

"The bank has come nowhere near to meeting this pledge. The international response to the crisis has been fundamentally inadequate," Sachs said.

According to Sachs, malaria reduces growth in sub-Saharan African economies by at least one percentage point a year. The disease persists because the malaria parasite has become resistant to chloroquine, the traditional treatment preferred by many governments because it is so cheap.

New, tougher treatments are now available but cost 10 times as much as chloroquine.

Sachs was also critical of African governments.

Out of 43 countries in the continent, 26 have yet to reduce or eliminate their taxes on mosquito nets.