Our congratulations go to Pakistan which this week celebrated the inauguration of the first National Entomological Reference Laboratory (NERL), in a ceremony led by the Vice-Chancellor of the Pir Mehar Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University in Rawalpindi. Other prominent dignitaries from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan also attended, and during the next week the facility will be visited by senior officials in the Ministry of Health. In a demonstration of the commitment of the Pakistan government towards capacity strengthening in vector skills, this modern state-of-the-art facility is entirely self-funded by the government, with no contribution from donors. The facility will house multiple Insectaries to maintain several species of Anopheles and also Aedes, which will form the basis for conducting Insecticide Resistance Assays and also enable a range of other studies. It will serve as a training facility where entomologists can be instructed in the practices of vector surveillance, not only for malaria control, but also the vectors of dengue, zika, chikungunya and other arboviruses. This good news reaches us from the head of the Pakistan Directorate of Malaria Control, Dr Muhammad Mukhtar, who said “This new reference laboratory will put us on equal footing with all other advanced Asian countries to conduct highest quality vector surveillance for improved control of mosquito-borne disease”