One year following the start of the international distribution of corona vaccines, only eleven percent of the people on the African continent have been fully vaccinated, according to official information. One reason is that many of the countries have had little vaccine for a long time, according to a paper by the Development Ministry that is available to the German Press Agency. Since 2021, projects with a total volume of 530 million euros have been funding the development of vaccine production in Africa.
However, the situation in the individual countries is very different, as an analysis tool from the development organization One shows. The Africa Corona Tracker combines data from the individual countries into a comparable overview. For example, 79.8 percent of people in the Seychelles are vaccinated with two doses, 71.9 percent on the island state of Mauritius and 62.9 percent in North African Morocco. The states have all received larger supplies or procured them with bilateral agreements.
The worst vaccination rates are in Burundi (0.1 percent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (0.2 percent) and Chad (0.8 percent). At the same time, these states also register low levels of trust in the government, higher levels of corruption and particular weaknesses in infrastructure. Relative to the population, they received fewer doses of vaccine, but – according to the data – only a small proportion actually vaccinated.
According to One, there are several main reasons why a large number of donated vaccine doses go unused: Supply chains and cold chains pose the greatest challenge in many African countries. Sometimes there are not enough syringes to administer the existing vaccine. Some countries donated vaccine doses that had already been delivered unused and had only a limited shelf life.