National dialogue for malaria vaccine introduction, Kindia, Guinea, June 2023
Photo: TDR/C. Merle
TDR, through the Access and Delivery Partnership (ADP), is supporting the Ministry of Health of Guinea’s plans to introduce a new malaria vaccine across the country.
As a first step, a five-day workshop in Kindia, Guinea, was held to facilitate a national dialogue for the introduction of a new malaria vaccine in Guinea. This was done in collaboration with OPT-SMC partners, Gavi, the WHO Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme, PATH and other key stakeholders.
Representatives from the National Malaria Programmes (NMPs), the Expanded Programmes of Immunization (EPIs), the Ministry of Health of Guinea, local and regional authorities, community representatives, frontline healthcare providers and civil society representatives met for five days to discuss the new malaria vaccines’ characteristics, the regional malaria epidemiology and vaccination coverage, and the best implementation strategies for the introduction of the malaria vaccines in Guinea. They were joined by country teams of Senegal and Togo who plan to conduct similar consultations for their own setting.
The participants shared their experience on previous roll-out of new vaccines and the challenges faced for achieving optimal coverage. Guinea also shared their experience of integrating catch-up vaccination activities and seasonal malaria chemoprevention campaigns which have been successfully conducted in some districts and led to an improvement of routine vaccination coverage.
This national dialogue was a first step toward developing the optimal delivery model for malaria vaccines. Lessons learned from the implementation research in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi informed discussions on the best vaccine administration models to consider taking into consideration high malaria seasonality and low routine vaccine coverage.
Following this meeting, the Ministry of Health of Guinea successfully applied to GAVI to secure procurement of malaria vaccines in late 2024.
The next step will be to roll out R21/Matrix-M vaccination in the selected pilot districts and evaluate implementation outcomes.
To do so, TDR initiated collaboration with the WHO Malaria Vaccine Implementation Programme, the WHO Global Malaria Programme and other key stakeholders to develop an evaluation and implementation research package (including protocol templates and data collection tools) to facilitate studies necessary for measuring the coverage of the vaccination strategy, understanding the barriers and measuring its effectiveness. This research package, dubbed “MVAC toolkit,” will be available by the end of 2024.
In parallel, the OPT-SMC team developed the OPT-MVAC project aiming at providing technical and financial support to 14 countries in West and Central Africa for optimizing malaria vaccine delivery strategies and maximizing vaccine efficacy in the context of high malaria seasonality and middle to low routine immunization coverage. Funds are sought for implementing this proposed project.
For more information, please contact:
Dr Corinne Merle at merlec@who.int
This article was originally published in https://tdr.who.int