Chloroquine (CQ) is still the drug of choice for the treatment of vivax malaria in Ethiopia, whereas artemether-lumefantrine (AL) is for falciparum malaria In this setting, clinical malaria cases are treated with AL This necessitated the need to assess the effectiveness of AL for the treatment of Plasmodium vivax with CQ as a comparator A total of 57 (80 3%) and 75 (85 2%) cases treated with CQ or AL, respectively, completed the study in an outpatient setting At the end of the follow-up period of 28 days a cumulative incidence of treatment failure of 7 5% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 2 9-18 9%) for CQ and 19% (95% CI = 11-31 6%) for AL was detected CQ resistance was confirmed in three of five CQ treatment failures cases The effectiveness of AL seems lower than CQ, however the findings were not conclusive, because the AL evening doses were not supervised