Fifteen African countries – nearly a third of the continent's 54 nations – have hit a global target of vaccinating at least 10 percent of their populations against COVID-19.

The World Health Organization (WHO) set the target for every country in May, seeking to ensure more inoculations.

Seychelles and Mauritius lead the continent's vaccination statistics, having fully vaccinated over 60 percent of their populations so far. Morocco has inoculated 48 percent of its population, while Tunisia, Comoros and Cape Verde have hit over 20 percent.

Nine African countries, including South Africa, Morocco and Tunisia, had reached the 10 percent goal at the beginning of September and another six managed to sprint ahead to reach the target this month due to rising vaccine deliveries.

Worth noting, the most vaccinated nations have relatively small populations, and 40 percent are small developing states.

"The latest data shows modest gains but there is still a long way to go to reach the WHO target of fully vaccinating 40% of the population by the end of the year. Shipments are increasing but opaque delivery plans are still the number one nuisance that hold Africa back," said Dr Richard Mihigo, Immunization and Vaccines Development Programme Coordinator for the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa.

Africa has seen an upsurge in vaccine arrivals in the recent past. In September, the continent received 23 million doses in September, a ten-fold increase from June.

However, with just 60 million people fully vaccinated in Africa, the continent still lags behind the rest of the world, accounting for just 2 percent of the over 6 billion vaccines given globally.

Various countries are now ramping up vaccinations after receiving more doses recently, with the aim of protecting more of their populations from the deadly virus.

By Thursday, the continent had recorded a total of 8,305,528 COVID-19 infections with 211,153 fatalities.