Ghana is the first in the world to approve the new vaccine, which is given to children aged five months to 36 months, the group most at risk of dying from malaria.

The university hopes this is the first crucial step in making the vaccine widely available to African children.

Professor Adrian Hill describes the announcement as the culmination of 30 years of work at the university to produce a “highly effective vaccine that can be produced on a relevant scale for the countries that need it most”.

The vaccine has shown promising results in clinical trials in young children, providing 77 percent protection against the disease, which claims more than 600,000 lives each year, most of them children.

Pharmaceutical giant GSK received another malaria vaccine recommended by the World Health Organization last year, which has been given to a million children. But that vaccine has a 60 percent protection rate and drops significantly over time, despite the booster dose.

The difficulty of developing an effective vaccine against malaria is partly due to the fact that the malaria parasite goes through several stages during its life cycle. Thus, the parasite changes when it enters the human body. When developing a vaccine against malaria, researchers must decide which part of the parasite’s life cycle the vaccine should target.