Twelve million doses of malaria vaccine have been delivered to 17 endemic countries through Gavi vaccination programme.
An estimated five million children in the 17 countries that collectively represent more than 70 per cent of the world’s malaria burden, have been protected.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, says lessons from the pilot malaria vaccination programme in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi that ran from 2019 to 2023 are helping guide country rollouts.
“Coordinated by WHO and funded by Gavi and partners, this pilot reached more than two million children and demonstrated that the malaria vaccine led to a significant reduction in malaria illnesses, a 13 per cent drop in overall child mortality and even higher reductions in hospitalisation,” Gavi said in a statement.
Gavi is a public-private partnership that helps vaccinate more than half the world’s children against some of the deadliest diseases.
It brings together developing country and donor governments, WHO, Unicef, the World Bank, the vaccine industry, technical agencies, civil society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private sector partners.
Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has helped to immunise more than 1.1 billion children and prevented more than 18.8 million deaths, helping to halve child mortality in 78 lower income countries.
Gavi says Cameroon became the first country to launch the vaccine as part of their routine immunisation programme, beginning with 42 districts in January last year.
By the end of 2026, the country aims to scale up to all 205 districts.
Gavi CEO Dr Sania Nishtar says in high-burden countries like Cameroon, where malaria claims more than 13,000 lives each year and represents close to 30 per cent of all hospital consultations, each percentage point reduction in cases, deaths and consultations represents lives transformed.
“That is why Gavi is supporting countries to roll out the malaria vaccine because it is a tool that can save lives and relieve the terrible burden this deadly disease places on families, communities and health systems,” she said.
“This early data is a small indicator of the potential public health impact of a programme we hope to scale up dramatically by the end of the decade – protecting millions of children around the world and reducing the stress malaria places on African health systems.”
Seventeen countries rolled out the malaria vaccine last year.
They are Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Benin, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, South Sudan, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Niger, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Nigeria.
The World malaria report 2024, showed in 2023, the number of malaria cases globally was estimated at 263 million, with an incidence of 60.4 cases per 1,000 population at risk.
This is an increase of 11 million cases from the previous year and a rise in incidence from 58.6 cases per 1,000 population at risk in 2022.
The WHO African Region continues to carry the heaviest burden of the disease, accounting for an estimated 94 per cent of cases worldwide.
The WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region has experienced a 57 per cent increase in incidence since 2021, rising to 17.9 cases per 1,000 population at risk in 2023.
The top five countries carrying the
heaviest estimated burden of malaria
cases in 2023 were Nigeria ( 26 per
cent), the Democratic Republic of
the Congo ( 13 per cent), Uganda (five
per cent), Ethiopia (four per cent)
and Mozambique (four per cent).