Twelve African countries will receive 18 million doses of malaria vaccine for children under the age of five, which will be rolled out in the next two years, multilateral institutions said on Thursday.

A joint statement from the World Health Organization (WHO), Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said the deployment of 18 million malaria vaccine doses, also called RTS, S/AS01, for the 2023-2025 period, aims to protect children from severe illness and death.

Kenya, Ghana and Malawi have since 2019 administered the malaria vaccine to more than 1.7 million children through the Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme (MVIP) coordinated by the WHO, GAVI, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Unitaid, a global health lobby.

The malaria vaccine has so far proved to be safe and effective, leading to a substantial reduction in severe malaria and fatalities among children below five years.

Nine more countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone and Uganda, will receive the malaria vaccine and introduce it in their routine immunization programs for the first time.

"This vaccine has the potential to be very impactful in the fight against malaria, and when broadly deployed alongside other interventions, it can prevent tens of thousands of future deaths every year," said Thabani Maphosa, Gavi's managing director of country programs delivery.

Maphosa added that multilateral institutions have partnered with manufacturers to help ramp up the supply of malaria vaccine doses in the high-endemic African nations.

Malaria kills nearly half a million children below five years annually in the sub-Saharan African region, which accounted for an estimated 95 percent of global malaria cases and 96 percent of deaths in 2021, according to the WHO.

Ephrem T. Lemango, associate director of immunization from UNICEF, noted that nearly every minute, a child under five years old dies of malaria in the continent, adding that the vaccine rollout will reduce severe cases and fatalities.

A total of 28 African countries have expressed interest in administering the malaria vaccine, and multilateral partners have developed a framework for addressing equity amid limited supplies.

Kate O'Brien, director of the WHO's Department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals, said scaling up malaria immunization will improve child survival in Africa.