Ghana has become the first country in the world to approve the highly anticipated R21 malaria vaccine that could save millions from the mosquito-borne disease. The disease kills a child every minute worldwide and in Ghana itself there were 5.3 million cases and 12,500 deaths in 2021.

The R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford and manufactured and scaled up by the Serum Institute of India (SII), is only the second vaccine the world has seen for a disease that has caused untold suffering for millennia.